From Russian influence campaigns pushing bogus claims about candidates, to new secretly partisan-funded “pink slime” sites masquerading as legitimate news outlets, NewsGuard analysts have been separating truth from fiction ahead of the midterm elections on Nov. 3, 2026. Here is some of our coverage that you may have missed.
Pay to Say: Influencers Caught in NewsGuard Sting
NewsGuard reporters presented themselves as a political consulting firm and asked 60 influencers to run a paid political message without disclosing the arrangement. More than one-third agreed.
X’s Community Notes Flunk the Midterms
X’s crowdsourced fact-checking program failed to catch 93 percent of posts advancing false midterms claims, a NewsGuard analysis found.
OpenAI’s Compliant Midterm Fake Image Machine
OpenAI’s new text-to-image generator, ChatGPT Image 2.5, created compromising images of political candidates 80 percent of the time when prompted, a NewsGuard audit found.
Russian Deepfake Accuses Talarico of Sexually Abusing Student
A Russian influence campaign created an AI-generated video targeting the Texas Senate race between Democrat James Talarico and Republican Ken Paxton. Top chatbots spread the Russian fake.
Russia Fabricates Sexual Assault Charges Against Sherrod Brown
A phony television news report concocted sexual assault allegations against the Democratic...
A 66-year-old Hong Kong woman lost nearly Rs 3 crore after scammers posing as investigators tricked her into transferring money over false money laundering allegations. Find the weak links in you...