Misinformation Spreads at Unprecedented Speed in Era of AI and Reduced Fact-Checking

In the immediate aftermath of the tragic murders of a Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband last weekend, social media platforms were flooded with unverified claims about the suspect’s motives. Before investigators had even apprehended the suspect, Vance Luther Boelter, political influencers online were already pushing narratives about why the killings occurred.

This pattern has become increasingly common in our digital landscape, where breaking news events trigger waves of misinformation that spread faster than facts.

“Trying to access verifiable and accurate information on the Internet at the moment is as difficult as I think it’s ever been,” explains David Gilbert, a veteran misinformation reporter at Wired who has been covering the topic for over a decade.

The problem extends well beyond this single incident. Recent protests against ICE raids in Los Angeles were largely peaceful, yet social media users would have seen a very different reality based on manipulated or misrepresented content. Similarly, images from President Trump’s military parade in Washington, D.C. appeared drastically different depending on which social media accounts shared them.

Gilbert notes that certain misinformation patterns have become predictable. “When breaking news happens, at this point, you can almost guess what some of the disinformation narratives are going to be,” he said.

In the case of the Los Angeles protests, misleading content included footage repurposed from the 2020 George Floyd protests and even scenes from the video game Arma 3, falsely presented as current events. Conspiracy theories about protesters being paid by George Soros—a claim amplified by former President Trump—circulated widely.

The rise of artificial intelligence has exponentially worsened this information ecosystem. AI-generated videos purportedly showing National Guard members in Los Angeles circulated last week, despite containing visual red flags that indicated they were fabricated.

“If you looked at the AI videos that people believed were real, there were issues with people’s faces, issues with the signs in the background, lots of very clear signals that it was AI. But people just don’t pay that much attention anymore. People want to be the first person to share it,” Gilbert explained.

Renee Diresta, author of “Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality,” points to problematic incentive structures on social media platforms that reward viral content regardless of accuracy. “People begin to realize that during chaotic events, they could actually capitalize on that chaos,” she said. “They could push out false and misleading stories…and they could actually monetize that.”

These incentives were initially designed to empower citizens to share genuine breaking news from their communities. “When people do this ethically, it’s incredibly powerful,” Diresta notes. However, the system has been increasingly exploited by bad actors seeking engagement and profit.

Cross-platform sharing compounds the problem. A video allegedly showing ICE agents separating a mother and baby went viral last week, garnering thousands of shares before experts could determine its authenticity. After investigation, Diresta believes the footage was real but likely from an older, unrelated incident—not a recent ICE raid as claimed.

Major platforms have simultaneously been scaling back fact-checking operations. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently announced plans to replace dedicated fact-checkers with “community notes” similar to those used on X (formerly Twitter). This reduction in professional oversight comes as more users turn to AI chatbots like X’s Grok and OpenAI’s ChatGPT to verify information.

This reliance on AI for fact-checking has proven problematic. Gilbert points to a recent incident where California Governor Gavin Newsom posted images of National Guard troops on X. When users asked Grok to verify the images, it incorrectly claimed they were from the 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. In reality, the images were authentic, as confirmed by the Department of Defense.

“These AI chatbots, which have been so lauded as revolutionary, as cutting-edge from a tech perspective, still have huge issues in producing accurate, fact-checked, verified information,” Gilbert said. “The reliance on these chatbots by a lot of people is a worrying escalation, because people are turning to them now because they don’t actually have human fact-checkers anymore at these companies that they can ask.”

As our society grows increasingly dependent on AI, experts worry about its impact on our shared understanding of reality. Diresta offers a sobering assessment: “We’re in really chaotic times, and the ability to create very plausible unreality is only getting better, even as our trust in each other continues to decline.”

The divergence in trusted information sources means achieving consensus on basic facts is becoming increasingly difficult—a fundamental challenge to democratic discourse and social cohesion.