Evolving Media & News Sources

Fabricated Stories That Many People Fall For

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  • February 17, 2026 at 10:48 am #59902
    PopeBeanie
    Moderator

    Here’s a 40 minute video that you don’t have to watch. I got about 10 minutes into it before deciding to do some fact checking. The description of the video did not clearly state that it is entirely fictional, and yet about 90% of people in the comments believed it, got upset, and some spewed long rants in response.

    I verified via Google Gemini, after it analyzed the video’s transcript, that the story was invented, as well as its character’s names.

    (I have no idea why the video’s thumbnail doesn’t show up here, unless maybe youtube knows it is faked, or maybe someone reported it as fake?)

    https://youtu.be/mhSvD_PYfFA?t=0

    February 17, 2026 at 5:37 pm #59907
    TheEncogitationer
    Participant

    PopeBeanie:

    The narrator was clearly an AI or Bot from how it mispronounced words. Also, the video had an appearance of being a grainy old-timey film when digital video doesn’t naturally have that appearance.

    Given what was going on in Minneapolis, the story could have been credible, though the devil is always in the details and always needs corroboration, as you rightly sensed when you verified it.

    March 16, 2026 at 5:54 am #60163
    PopeBeanie
    Moderator

    I saw a suspicious title of a youtube video, with commentors expressing themselves enthusiastically. So this time I searched for “hegseth fired”, and found two more productions like it. All three were uploaded to different channels, and all three had some commentator doing his “expert” commentating after the same footage of a news show. Neither the news show nor the commentator mentioned that Hegseth was fired. And they all had tons of comments from gullible reactors.

    I know this isn’t surprising. I’m just documenting this as an example of how misinformation evolves to increasingly widespread consumption. Soooo many people just clicking and lapping it up! Maybe lots of bots, too. I wanted to take just one screencap of the three vids, but I’m still not able to post photos, so I’ll just put the links below. I’m also curious to see if youtube eventually removes them or removes the intentionally misinformative channels.

    The youtube channel names are:
    Anti-Trump News
    Accountability Network USA
    DEMOCRACY REACTION HUB
    (Together, they all have over 700k subscribers.)
    (Ah, now I see one the thumbnails says “Altered or synthetic content”.)



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