A City Council Candidate Made Fake CNN News Stories on His Phone. It Probably Won't Be the Last Time.
A New York race showed how easy it is to generate convincing fake political news with AI. The tools are only getting cheaper and faster.
Key points
- Jonathan Rinaldi, a Queens city council candidate, used an AI chatbot in October 2024 to generate fabricated news stories and fake endorsements about his opponent.
- One fake story carried a CNN logo and falsely claimed incumbent Lynn Schulman had dropped out of the race.
- Rinaldi shared the fabricated content on Facebook and Instagram during the active campaign period.
- Schulman won the November 2024 election by a landslide despite the false claims.
- Researchers and election-integrity experts told The Guardian that AI-generated political disinformation is spreading faster than platforms can respond.
Jonathan Rinaldi was lying in bed, tapping on his iPhone, asking an AI chatbot to invent news stories for him. He was running for a city council seat in Queens, New York. His opponent was Lynn Schulman, a sitting Democrat. The stories were fake. He shared one anyway.
The post looked real. It carried a CNN logo and claimed Schulman had been "forced to drop out of the race due to a series of critical mistakes." She hadn't quit. She hadn't made any such mistakes. Schulman won the November 2024 election by a landslide.
How hard is it to make a fake news story like this?
Not very hard. Consumer AI chatbots draft convincing text in seconds. Adding a recognisable logo takes basic image editing, or sometimes nothing more than another prompt. The whole operation, as Rinaldi demonstrated, fits on a phone screen.
This is what worries researchers. The barrier used to be skill: you needed to write convincingly and build distribution. Now it's closer to zero.
Deepfakes add another layer. A fabricated clip of a candidate conceding, or making a damaging statement, can travel across social media in hours. By the time a denial goes out, the original lie has already reached millions. Our coverage of a tabletop exercise at Infosecurity Europe showed exactly how quickly a fake CEO video can collapse trust inside an organisation; the dynamic in a political race is the same, just with a larger and less sceptical audience.
Should you worry?
The practical upshot for ordinary voters is uncomfortable but simple. If a dramatic political story appears in your feed, especially one involving a candidate quitting or caught in a scandal, slow down before sharing. Search the candidate's name across several sources. A story that exists only as a screenshot, or only on one obscure page, is a warning sign.
Rinaldi's stunt failed. Schulman won easily. But the next attempt may be better constructed, or aimed at a race where the margin is thinner. It's worth remembering that Rinaldi wasn't a sophisticated actor with a production budget. He was a guy in bed with a phone. The tools won't get harder to use.
