ChatGPT Cited Fake Local News Sites Boosting Democratic Candidates in Competitive House Races
Published · updated · curated by AI Is Going Just Great
Source: wlrn.org ↗
"There really is this competition for curation, and it's going to have interesting ramifications as the frontier companies themselves try to figure out how to get better at not falling for it."
Ahead of the 2026 midterms, NPR found that ChatGPT was citing a network of 37 websites disguised as local news outlets to boost Democratic candidates in competitive U.S. House races. The sites were all registered on September 15 — 36 of them within an 8-minute window — and flooded with articles likely generated by AI. One site, the "Kalamazoo Beacon," had published exactly 16 stories, every one of them about a single Democratic candidate. When NPR asked ChatGPT which House candidates in Michigan's 4th Congressional District cared about affordability, the chatbot ranked that candidate first and cited the Beacon as a source.
NPR tested 37 queries across ChatGPT and Gemini. ChatGPT cited at least one article from the network in 19 of those responses — roughly half the time — and 17 of those citations came from sites posing as local news. Gemini cited none. Every site in the network contained an llms.txt file and explicitly allowed AI crawlers to scrape them, a detail one researcher called unusual and biased toward tech-sector websites. After NPR flagged the sites to OpenAI, the Kalamazoo Beacon was still cited every time NPR ran the same query five more times. OpenAI said it "takes action to improve model responses when issues are brought to our attention." It's unclear what, if anything, changed.