Fox News Fell For AI-Generated Rage Bait, Rewrote Story To Pretend It Didn’t

Failures

from the the-confirmation-bias-network dept

Fox News has a problem: when you build your entire editorial model around feeding your audience’s biases, you stop asking whether the stories feeding those biases are actually true. Case in point: last week, they published—and then quietly rewrote—a story about SNAP recipients threatening to “ransack stores,” based entirely on AI-generated videos that never happened.

Rather than running a correction or retraction, they simply rewrote the article at the same URL, with the same timestamp, transforming a story about “SNAP beneficiaries threatening to ransack stores” into a story about “AI-generated videos going viral” even though the article doesn’t make any sense. The deception is in the architecture: casual readers following the original link would have no idea the entire premise had been fabricated.

The timing of this matters. With the still ongoing battle over the Trump administration breaking the law to deny SNAP benefits to deserving recipients, the loyal state media folks at Fox News needed some sort of blatantly bullshit, racist story to make it sound like SNAP recipients were ungrateful.

After all, Trump-loyal media has been gleefully platforming Republicans lying about who gets SNAP benefits and what they do with it for a while. And Fox News needs to keep up.

And Fox News knows better than most that the easiest way to fan the flames of a culture war is to engage in a form of “nut picking.” Going searching, often on social media, for an isolated random person saying something crazy, and then presenting them as if they’re mainstream or common, entirely to make biased bigots feel that the people they hate really are as bad as they want to believe.

But the AI element adds something new here. Why go hunting through X or TikTok to find some rando wack job to show off as “Exhibit A” when someone can just make an AI-generated video faking someone even crazier than anyone actually online?

On Friday, “production assistant” Alba Cuebas-Fantauzzi at Fox News Digital, who seems to specialize in publishing culture war nonsense, took things to another level, publishing an article claiming that “SNAP beneficiaries threaten to ransack stores over government shutdown.”

Except, as would be obvious to anyone who did even the most basic reporting, the video was entirely AI generated. The women did not exist. Their complaints did not exist. It was digital fiction presented as fact.

Fox News fell for it completely. And when called out, rather than acknowledge the error with a proper correction, they simply rewrote the article at the same URL, keeping the same timestamp, but now pretending it was a story that AI videos of fake SNAP beneficiaries had “gone viral.”

Why did they go viral, Fox News?

The fucking gall.

The new version transforms the story into one about how AI-generated videos “have gone viral”—as if that was what they’d been reporting on all along. They insert phrases like “which appears to be generated by AI” into the text and massively shorten the piece, cutting out the quotes from “conservative commentators” who had also fallen for the fakes. But they keep the original timestamp, creating the impression that this is what they’d published from the start.

I mean, here’s the original opening:

And then the revised one with the inserted “apparently generated by AIs” added in:

The edited version is incoherent. The text still refers to “the same woman” making complaints—but there is no woman. She never existed. The entire premise evaporated, but they kept enough of the original scaffolding that sentences now reference people who don’t exist and events that never happened.

Fox News eventually added this “editor’s note” to the bottom:

Editor’s note: This article previously reported on some videos that appear to have been generated by AI without noting that. This has been corrected.  

This “editor’s note” fundamentally misrepresents what happened. The article didn’t fail to “note” that videos were AI-generated. The article existed because Fox News believed the videos were real. The entire story was predicated on the false premise that actual SNAP recipients were making actual threats. When that premise collapsed, so did any justification for the story existing at all.

But as Parker Molloy points out, even if the videos had been real, this would still be journalistic malpractice.

But here’s what makes this worse than a simple mistake: even if these had been real people, this would still be garbage journalism. Taking random social media posts and framing them as representative of an entire group — in this case, SNAP recipients — is a tactic that’s been used to demonize marginalized communities for years. Find the most outrageous-sounding person you can, amplify their voice, and present them as typical of everyone who shares their identity or circumstances. It’s nut-picking dressed up as trend reporting, and news organizations know better.

Fox News absolutely knows better. But when your business model depends on feeding your audience a steady diet of confirmation bias—particularly when the administration you’ve backed is facing criticism for illegally cutting benefits—the incentive structure points away from verification and toward amplification of anything that fits the narrative.

The real story here is that Fox News’ entire editorial model is designed to be fooled by exactly this kind of content. When you build a system optimized for finding stories that confirm your audience’s biases about marginalized groups, you create an infrastructure perfectly suited to amplify fabricated rage bait.

And when you get caught? Just memory-hole it with a stealth edit and move on to the next outrage. No real correction, no accountability, just a quiet rewrite that most readers will never notice.

It’s the institutional rot made visible: a news organization so committed to feeding confirmation bias that it can’t distinguish between real outrage and AI-generated fiction—and when the fiction is exposed, would rather gaslight its readers than admit the error, or to learn anything from it.

Filed Under: ai, alba cuebas-fantauzzi, confirmation bias, donald trump, fake news, snap
Companies: fox news