NewsBreak, America’s most downloaded news app, has been distributing false stories authored by AI since 2021, according to Reuters.
NewsBreak is a free app with Chinese origins that rewrites press releases and local news using artificial intelligence algorithms in addition to publishing licensed content from reputable news sources like CNN, AP, and Reuters itself.
Last year, on Christmas Eve, the software released a frightening article about a town shooting, with its headline reading “Christmas Day Tragedy Strikes Bridgeton, New Jersey Amid Rising Gun Violence in Small Towns.” No such shooting, however, had ever happened. The story was subsequently dismissed as “entirely false” in a Facebook message published by the Bridgeton, New Jersey police department on December 27.
A Colorado-based food bank also told Reuters that it had to turn people away in January, February, and March because NewsBreak broadcast an incorrect food delivery schedule. When it protested about the company’s erroneous reporting, it got no reaction. Another Pennsylvanian nonprofit complained that NewsBreak twice ran an article claiming that it was hosting a 24-hour foot clinic for the homeless, but that was untrue.
Only accessible in the US, NewsBreak was first introduced there as a division of Yidian, a Chinese corporation that is partially controlled by a state-affiliated media organization in China. Although Yidian is no longer associated with the app, IDG Capital, a Beijing-based business that the Pentagon claims is linked to the Chinese military, is one of its main backers.
Reuters was informed by former staff members that although NewsBreak bills itself as a US-based app with US investors, the majority of the work on its algorithms is really done by Chinese developers. CEO of NewsBreak Jeff Zheng told Reuters that the website conforms with US data and privacy rules and is hosted on US-based Amazon servers. Zheng stated that the servers’ anonymized data is the only thing its Chinese employees can access.
