Democrats love to decry misinformation, and they do so for a very specific reason: to distract from the fact that misinformation and Narrative™ control are the most powerful tools in their toolbox. 

Don't get me wrong; everybody wants to control The Narrative™. That is why everybody has a PR agent of some kind and uses rhetoric to persuade people. It's just that the Democrats have a vice grip on the cultural means of production and the bureaucracies and institutions that provide "reliable" information, so Republicans have a tough time competing on this battleground, and their voters tend to be a lot more skeptical of narratives in the first place. 

One of the brilliant things about decrying "misinformation" or "money in politics" is that you are telling people what they want to hear — that deceiving people is bad and that buying elections is wrong — and that makes people less likely to notice that you are deceiving people and buying elections.

After all, you are the people against that, right?

Yeah, well, no. Not in the least. The Left is all about both. Obama ran against both, for instance, but he ran the most expensive campaign in history, by far, when he ran and won, and one of the tools his campaign used was manipulating Google results to create a playing field that favored him. 

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Life in 2026 is far more complicated and sophisticated, and Democrats have adapted well to the landscape. And they have deep connections in Big Tech and own the PR landscape, so it shouldn't surprise us that their geniuses have figured out how to poison AI to feed sophisticated misinformation to voters. 

Ahead of the midterms, some voters are turning to ChatGPT to help them decide who to vote for. When asked for information about candidates in some highly competitive races, NPR found that OpenAI's AI chatbot cited a set of websites that are thinly veiled political ads made to look like reporting from local news outlets.

Less than two weeks before Election Day, when asked "Which House candidates in [Michigan's 4th Congressional District] care about affordability?," the chatbot said Democrat Sean McCann had the "Most detailed published affordability plan" at the very top of its answer. The stakes in this race are high – it's one of the competitive U.S. House races that could determine control of the chamber.

ChatGPT's response when NPR asked "Which House candidates in [Michigan's 4th Congressional District] care about affordability?"

As a citation, ChatGPT linked to a website called the Kalamazoo Beacon. The Beacon labels its articles as "news articles" in the website's source code. The outlet also describes itself in the site's source code as "Reporting on Kalamazoo, southwest Michigan, and the issues shaping lakeshore communities."

But the Kalamazoo Beacon has only published 16 stories, all about McCann, his policy positions and his record as a state legislator, NPR's review shows.

The Beacon is one of 10 "local news" websites that promote one Democrat apiece in competitive U.S. House races. The 10 sites are part of a larger group of 37 websites identified by the digital security firm VisionHeight that promote many more candidates, mostly Democrats, for a slew of federal, state and local offices, as well as some nonpartisan posts like judges.

ChatGPT's citation of these websites highlights how AI-generated answers can become yet another avenue for stealthy political advertising as more voters consult chatbots before they head to the polls.

This is a far more sophisticated version of a tactic Democrats have used in the past: creating fake newspapers delivered to people's homes, presented as "news" but really PR packages for candidates or parties. 

But those were fairly transparent; seeding fake news into AI is not, because AI presents information as if it comes from neutral "news" sources, when in fact it is just laundered propaganda not identified as such. 

In much the same way that Google will launder Wikipedia answers as authoritative in its AI summaries, making the left-leaning "editors" at the site extremely powerful in creating a Truman Show reality, the fake "news" sites provide another layer of credibility to campaign propaganda. 

The set of 37 websites presents candidates in different, overlapping groups. Each of the 10 Democrats covered by a site purporting to cover local news is also the sole subject of a site that offers opinion articles about why voters should support them. The various candidates, who are running in different states, also show up in roundup-style articles on five more websites that have names such as "Public Safety Democrats" and "Democratic Women in the House."

The volume of websites and articles may also help the network's operator boost their preferred narratives, DiResta said.

Another 12 websites, each focusing on a state, covered the House candidates in those states as well as other state and local candidates running for office. The state and national websites also boosted an 11th House candidate that did not have her own dedicated site purporting to be local news.

While most of the sites are openly partisan, the articles published by the network link out to sources for the claims they make, such as congressional voting records, mainstream news articles and partisan news sources, such as the pro-Democrat Courier network.

The genius of these sites is that they are not meant to be read by humans at all. They are designed to optimize for web crawlers and cross-link so the network appears far larger and more credible than it actually is.  It's the same principle used in academic journals, where citations serve as a form of credibility checking ("peers take this work seriously), which has led to junk papers actually getting more citations because they create a web of cites that make them appear influential. 

The websites transparently welcome AI chatbots: All the websites explicitly allow a long list of AI crawlers made by major AI companies to scrape information off of them. Many articles are formatted as questions and answers, which chatbots tend to prefer to cite. Many news organizations prevent such crawlers from going through their websites because the crawlers take content without bringing in revenue.

Every website in the network also contained a file called llms.txt, which lists articles on the site in plain text. This is surprising because most websites don't have these files, said Alisha Ukani, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public, who noticed these files while reviewing the sites at NPR's request. Ukani focuses on how AI is changing the internet. In an email, she noted that the websites that do have llms.txt files tend to be "biased towards technology and business-related websites."

To gauge the group's success in getting picked up by AI chatbots, NPR drafted 37 questions and used them on ChatGPT and Gemini, the two most popular AI chatbots, as well as Google search, which sometimes provides AI-generated answers in its results. For each of the 10 congressional races, NPR asked more general questions, such as which candidates care about issues such as public safety. NPR also asked the chatbots questions more specific to individual candidates, such as their priorities.

In 19 responses, or about half the time, ChatGPT cited at least one article from the network of websites, often citing them alongside other sources such as Ballotpedia, a website that tracks races and candidates, or the candidates' own campaign websites. In 17 of those 19 times, the chatbot cited one of the outlets that pretended to be a local news site. In the other two instances, ChatGPT cited websites from the network that purport to cover politics in a state.

The group's output may have been even more successful in being picked up when users ask about down ballot candidates. NPR identified five city council candidates in Michigan that a website in the group called the Wolverine State Report covered. When NPR asked ChatGPT about the positions of each of the candidates, ChatGPT cited the website every time.

Unlike traditional search engines, submitting the same question multiple times to a chatbot can give users significantly different responses. NPR submitted each query only once, so future or parallel experiments may yield different results. However, preliminary research has shown that chatbots tend to cite questionable sources more often when there are very few sources of credible reporting, such as downballot races where there is often less news coverage. The phenomenon is called a "data void."

What's truly remarkable is how quickly these sites poisoned the information landscape, showing how sophisticated the operation is. The sites showed up in mid-September and almost instantly became authoritative sources in AIs that people use to choose which candidate to vote for. 

Here's how it worked:

All the candidates being promoted are denying involvement, and I am certain that this is technically not true. Nor is it likely that any party organization is involved. And, so far, nobody can track down who is behind this. 

Dark money, in other words, made this happen. 

You know, the kind of "dark money" that Democrats want out of politics.