The Age of Fake News and AI Slop: How Algorithms, Behaving Like Dementors, Are Choking Real Journalism

In the world of Harry Potter, Dementors cannot tell the innocent from the guilty. They simply drain the soul from anyone who comes too close. In today’s digital landscape, the real Dementors are search crawlers and blunt algorithms that are either unable, or unwilling, to tell the difference between genuine, hard-earned journalism and hollow “AI slop” created solely to game the system.

These algorithmic Dementors now patrol the internet, quietly robbing authority and visibility from legitimate news outlets like PuneNow, while unethical content farms continue to flourish. In this broken ecosystem, the machine’s failure to distinguish real reporting from manufactured trends has given rise to a multi-million-dollar slop economy, thriving at the direct expense of truth, credibility, and public trust.

We are no longer just dealing with simple mistakes. We are witnessing Information Colonization, where algorithms are weaponized against the truth and local anxieties are harvested for clicks.

The Case of the “Wayané Mooncrest”

A perfect example of this surfaced recently with claims of a supposed scientific miracle: the rediscovery of a “rare and beautiful bird” called the Wayané Mooncrest. An article making this claim was prominently showcased by Google on its Discover platform, giving it wide visibility and implied credibility.

There is just one problem: The Wayané Mooncrest does not exist.

By using fictitious nomenclature, these publishers create “uncontested digital space.” Because no real scientist has ever written about a “Wayané Mooncrest,” the scammer’s article faces zero competition. Google, in its quest for “fresh” and “unique” content, elevates it to the top. However, search engines are not able to identify this AI slop and are showcasing this at the top of their premium discovery platforms, such as Google Discover and Google News, where millions of users are fed this fiction as fact.

This isn’t just about fake birds in distant jungles; it is happening right here in Pune. These publishers are now concocting “facts” about non-existent infrastructure and weather patterns. Their most cynical tactic is the “Double-Dip” Monetization Strategy.

Consider a recent real-life example familiar to every commuter in our city. Not long ago, a local online “news” channel published a sensational claim that toll rates on the Mumbai-Pune Expressway were about to be hiked. The news spread like wildfire, causing immediate public outcry and massive traffic to their site. The very next day, the same channel published a “debunking” story, rubbishing the claim and blaming “other media outlets” for spreading rumors. By being both the arsonist (the fake news) and the firefighter (the correction), they profited twice. They captured the initial “rage-clicks” and then captured the “truth-seeker” search traffic.

This “Double-Dip” is most dangerous when they play with the sky above us. We are seeing a surge in imaginary weather “alerts” that go far beyond the IMD’s official forecasts, using a specific type of scaremongering: “The 24-Hour Watch.”

• The “Atmospheric Shift” Scare: Headlines scream, “Watch out: In the next 24 hours, the winds will change, the pressure will drop, and Pune will face an unprecedented climatic shift.” They use vague but ominous language to trigger survival instincts.
• Crucial Next 24 Hours for Weather: Publishers generate headlines like “IMD predicts winds will change, next 24 hours crucial, watch out!” to manufacture a sense of impending doom.
• The “Cyclone Sahyadri” Fabrication: During the monsoon, slop farms concoct non-existent tropical depressions. They warn of a “Twin Cyclone forming off the Konkan coast, expected to bring extremely heavy rain by Friday,” forcing thousands of panicked residents to flood official websites that have no such record.

Just like the toll hike scam, these weather “arsonists” return a day later with a “Fact Check” article titled “Don’t Panic: The Truth About the Impending Weather Disaster.” They are monetizing the very anxiety they manufactured, treating our city’s safety as nothing more than a high-engagement game.

The Credibility Parasite

To make these lies stick, they use what I call the Credibility Parasite technique. They scrape real quotes from reputable sources, like the WHO, the MSRDC, or global news agencies, and drop them into fabricated stories. To an algorithm, the presence of a “credible” quote or a verified official’s name makes the entire lie look like high-quality journalism.

The Algorithmic Injustice

As the Managing Editor of a real newsroom, this is the part that hits home: The algorithms often cannot tell the difference. In the rush to catch low-quality content, legitimate, human-led local news sites like PuneNow often get penalized for minor technicalities, the “Harry Potters” of the publishing world. Meanwhile, the professional slop-farms fly scot-free because their technical SEO is perfect, even if their content is poison. They provide the “unique data” the algorithm craves, regardless of whether that data exists in the real world.

Search Engines: Blind, Powerful, and Unaccountable

The problem doesn’t end there. A few dominant search engines now hoard almost all internet traffic, effectively monopolising attention, and then hand it out to publishers like scraps from the table. That alone would have been bad enough. What makes it worse is that their algorithms have no real way of judging whether content is genuine or garbage. Driven by outdated, blunt logic, they routinely funnel traffic to AI slop farms and fake content factories, while honest, human work is pushed aside. Meaningful human oversight in content evaluation has been reduced to a token gesture, if it exists at all.

Our Stance at PuneNow

The internet is being polluted at a rate humans cannot match. While these bots can “concoct” a thousand articles on a fake toll hike or a made-up species in the time it takes me to write this, they lack one thing: Presence.

They aren’t on the streets of Pune. They don’t have a reputation to protect or a community to answer to. At PuneNow, our defense against the Dementors of Slop remains simple: Hyper-local accountability. We will continue to name our sources, verify our facts, and exist in the real world, because while a bot can invent a bird, it can never replace a neighbor.