A string of frightening claims about the Ohio train derailment spreading contamination to the Mississippi River has been traced back to a bogus news website that uses AI-generated “reporters,” according to an expert. The claims began circulating on Twitter earlier this week in what Caroline Orr Bueno, a behavioral scientist who studies disinformation, described as a “coordinated campaign.” Several Twitter users shared the exact same map to push the claim that farms along the Mississippi River were under threat from dangerous chemicals released in the Ohio train derailment, despite experts reassuring that is not the case. In a Substack on Friday, Bueno noted that many of the conspiratorial posts were taken from Eden Reports, a site registered with a Lithuanian-based registrar that purports to be a news source but relies on “writers” that are actually AI-generated.
