$105 to Create an AI-Generated Partisan Local News Website
PLUS: Zelensky Manor Misinformation; O.J. Simpson-COVID Vaccine Hoax
Welcome to NewsGuard's Reality Check, a report on how misinformation online is undermining trust — and who’s behind it.
Today:
$105 to create an AI-generated partisan local news website
Highgrove hoax: A butler debunks a Zelensky royal real estate ruse
McDonald’s gets a byte: AI spawns devilish Happy Meal hoax
Blurred lines at The New York Times: Gray lady fails news vs. opinion, says NewsGuard
The Juice hoax is loose: O.J. Simpson’s death fuels vaccine myths
And more…
Today’s newsletter was edited by Jack Brewster and Eric Effron.
1. Analysis: How for $105, I Created an AI-generated Pink-Slime News Website Timed for the Election Year
By Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz
NewsGuard enterprise editor Jack Brewster wrote a narrative essay in this past weekend’s Wall Street Journal about his experiment seeing how hard it would be to create an AI-generated, partisan local news website.
As the article explains, for just $105, Jack employed a developer from freelance marketplace Fiverr to create a self-sustaining, AI-powered news site designed to churn out politically biased articles. Jack named the site “Buckeye State Press” and directed the developer to design it in the style of a traditional Ohio newspaper, with a focus on covering Ohio political news. In two days, the developer, using tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT, coded Buckeye State Press to churn out news articles about Ohio autonomously. Jack instructed the AI to generate news stories that first favored the Republican challenger in the race, Bernie Moreno, then switched to have the site favor Democratic incumbent Sherrod Brown.
Please read the Wall Street Journal story: The results flabbergasted even us, as used as we are to the easy spread of misinformation. As an example, the site made up a flattering story about Moreno attending a local high school basketball game and, when prompted instead to favor his opponent, made up a story about Brown attending the 2nd Annual Ohio Fig Festival.
Pandora’s box opened: Now that Jack showed how cheap and easy it is to create a credible-looking local pink-slime website, how long will it be before political partisans on both sides use AI to create many more such websites? For $105, expect this abuse of news consumers to be a dream come true for malign actors. Having worn the black hat, NewsGuard analysts are better prepared to put on the white hat and continue to track AI-generated websites — we’ve found 794 so far, even before the Wall Street Journal story.
Learn more about "The Death of Truth."
2. Manor Misinformation: Zelensky's Fabricated Royal Real Estate Deal
Add crown jewels from among the estates owned by King Charles to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s apparently thriving real estate portfolio.
What happened: Pro-Kremlin sources, including Russian state media, falsely claim that Zelensky bought Highgrove House, an English countryside estate, from King Charles for £20 million.
The evidence? A fabricated quote by the king’s former butler. The claim appears to be part of an anti-Ukraine disinformation campaign that seeks to paint Zelensky as corrupt.
“Vladimir [sic] Zelensky bought the Highgrove House mansion from King Charles III of Great Britain,” said an April 3, 2024, article by Sputnik News (NewsGuard Trust Score: 27.5/100), a Russian state-owned outlet.
Who’s behind it: The claim apparently first appeared in a March 31, 2024, YouTube video that was narrated by “Sam Murphy,” who security experts told the London Times (Trust Score: 100/100) appeared to be AI-generated, and featured footage from an unrelated February 2023 meeting between Zelensky and King Charles.
The video cited King Charles’ former butler Grant Harrold as supposedly confirming the purchase.
Actually: Zelensky did not purchase Highgrove House from King Charles.
Harrold, the former butler quoted in the video, told NewsGuard: “These claims are completely false, I have never put out a statement or spoken to anyone regarding this story.”
If you're curious, yes, this is the first instance of a butler debunking a false claim for NewsGuard.
Do you work in Trust and Safety for a technology company, in brand safety for advertising or otherwise counter misinformation as part of your job? Find out about NewsGuard’s weekly Risk Briefings, a more detailed briefing for professionals. Click here.
3. The Devil Made Them Do it: McDonald’s Hit With AI-Fueled Satanic Happy Meal Hoax
It’s the Happy Meal prize from hell.
What happened: Social media users are falling for an AI image of a “Baphomet Happy Meal.” It’s even got a nickname: the “Baphomeal.”
Baphomet? Baphomet is a pagan deity that the Knights Templar were accused of worshiping. It later became an occult symbol used by groups including the Church of Satan, according to Encyclopedia Britannica (Trust Score: 87.5/100).
A closer look: An image showing the purported Happy Meal — a black Happy Meal box with the McDonald’s logo and “Baphomet” written on it, a black hamburger, and an Baphomet action figure — circulated on X and TikTok in English and Spanish, cumulatively gaining more than 692,000 views as of April 4, 2024.
An April 1, 2024, TikTok video posted by user @unapologetically_0820 said, “If you are a believer of Christ, you should not be supporting McDonald’s. … If you support McDonald’s, you support their satanic agendas.”
Watch the video below:
Some context: Because of their connection to the Church of Satan, Baphomet figurines are frequently perceived as anti-Christian and suggestive of devil worship.
Actually: The image was AI generated and there is no such Happy Meal for sale. A reverse image search shows that the image of the satanic-themed Happy Meal first appeared in a March 27, 2024, X post by meme account @AmericaReal3 that stated, “New McDonald's Happy Meal. Your kids will LoVe It.”
In a March 27, 2024, post on X, @AmericaReal3, revealed that the image was AI generated, writing in a reply to his original post, “It’s an AI joke.”
You can help: This is not the first time a social media user has shared an AI image as satire, only to have other users miss the joke.
If you see something, say something: Send examples of AI satire being mistaken for news to realitycheck@newsguardtech.com.
Click here to find out more about NewsGuard Trust Scores and our process for rating websites. You can download NewsGuard’s browser extension, which displays NewsGuard Trust Score icons next to links on search engines, social media feeds, and other platforms by clicking here.
4. And One Last Thing: Fact or Opinion? New York Times Mixes its News and Views, Says NewsGuard
It’s not every day that a change to one criterion of one of NewsGuard’s thousands of Nutrition Labels generates media attention, but when it comes to The New York Times, there’s a low bar for “news.”
What happened: In April, we updated our Nutrition Label for NYTimes.com, and the newspaper no longer passes NewsGuard’s standard for differentiating news and opinion.
That means that the paper’s NewsGuard Trust Score fell from a perfect 100/100 to 87.5/100.
Some journalists and news blogs took notice: Former Chicago Tribune managing editor James O’Shea wrote on his blog, Jeoshea.com: “In a gutsy report, NewsGuard, the global media rating service, gave The New York Times a failing grade for allowing opinion to seep into its news coverage.”
O’Shea wrote: “In failing the Times on the essential criteria of handling the difference between news and opinion, NewsGuard cited numerous opinion pieces published in its news pages that should have been adequately identified with standard labels such as analysis or commentary.”
And former Washington Post media reporter Paul Farhi wrote on X: “Under the radar but interesting (and maybe important): NewsGuard, which (quite fairly) rates news organizations for credibility and quality, has downgraded the @nytimes for the first time.”
In response to NewsGuard’s questions about differentiating news from opinion, company spokesperson Naseem Amini did not address any specifics and said in a January 2024 email: "Our news report brings together firsthand accounts, insights and necessary context that, paired with reporters' deep expertise in the field, helps readers understand the bigger picture around complex news topics. Our opinion journalism serves readers in an entirely different way, offering a wide range of explicit perspectives on relevant issues."
Read NewsGuard’s Nutrition Label for The New York Times by clicking here.
Note: NewsGuard regularly updates its Nutrition Labels, checking to ensure that the Trust Score is still accurate. You can read more about our process here.
5. And yet another last thing … Posthumous Pandemic: O.J. Simpson is Anti-vaxxers’ Latest Obsession
When it comes to COVID-19 misinformers, it seems, no death of a famous person should go unnoticed.
What happened: Within minutes of reports announcing OJ Simpson’s death due to cancer on April 11, prominent health misinformers blamed the COVID-19 vaccine.
Turbo-charged misinformation: Simpson, the accounts baselessly claimed, had died of “turbo cancer” — a popular buzzword among misinformation sources advancing the false narrative that COVID-19 vaccines have caused aggressive and hard-to-treat cancers.
A closer look: Among the users to make the false claim were far-right commentator Alex Jones of Infowars and @unhealthytruth, an account that has repeatedly and baselessly blamed celebrity deaths on the COVID-19 vaccine.
In a post at 11:02 a.m. on April 11, 2024 — less than 10 minutes after news stories announced Simpson’s death — @unhealthytruth reshared an old, August 2021 video of Simpson advising his followers to get vaccinated. “OJ Simpson telling everybody to get their Covid shots like he did,” @unhealthy truth wrote in the caption. “Now he’s dead of #TurboCancer.” The post had 780,000 views as of April 12, 2024.
In his post, shared under an hour later, Infowars’ Jones shared a compilation of comedian Norm McDonald, former host of SNL’s “Weekend Update,” cracking jokes about Simpson on the program. In the caption, Jones wrote, “OJ Simpson is dead. The law could not kill him but the Covid shots did.” The post had 728,000 views as of April 12, 2024.
Actually: There is no evidence Simpson’s death stemmed from the vax, and “turbo cancer” is not a thing.
Cancer organizations, including the American Cancer Society and the National Cancer Institute, have repeatedly made clear that there is no evidence linking COVID-19 vaccines to cancer.
Produced by co-CEOs Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz, and the NewsGuard team.
We launched Reality Check after seeing how much interest there is in our work beyond the business and tech communities that we serve. Subscribe to this newsletter to support our apolitical mission to counter misinformation for readers, brands, and democracies. Have feedback? Send us an email: realitycheck@newsguardtech.com.