Are Social Security Beneficiaries Getting a Fourth Stimulus Check?

The goal is to “rank high in search results in some way and attract viewers to their site,” Sadeghi says.

These sites are often “saturated in advertising,” placed by automated buyers “without much regard to the quality or the nature of the source,” she says. “By bringing viewers and readers to their sites, they are hoping that people will, in turn, click on these advertisements and they will gain financial revenue.”

NewsGuard’s AI Tracking Center, launched in April, has identified more than 700 purported news and information sites operating with little or no human oversight. The number is “growing on a weekly basis,” Sadeghi says, but the tracker count is likely “just scratching the surface.”

Spotting signs of AI

The stories most often peddled by content farms are “fake death hoaxes about celebrities,” Sadeghi says, “but the one about stimulus checks is one that hasn’t really gone away.” Whether AI-generated or not, such sites pick up on “an uptick in search results for something” and publish content related to that search term, leading others to follow suit, she says.

Sadeghi recommends readers who aren’t sure about a news site’s quality or veracity look for these signs of unreliable, AI-generated content:

• Inconsistent information. AI-generated articles “often contain contradictions or conflicting info,” or even error messages, Sadeghi says.
• Repetition. Content farm articles will often repeat a key phrase like “stimulus checks” dozens of times.
• No attribution. “We’ll see a lot of missing citations,” Sadeghi says. “None of the information is credited anywhere.”
• Lack of transparency. Does the story have a byline or any way to verify the writer’s identity? Does the site disclose information about who is behind it?