🗳️AI Chatbots Cite Partisan 'Pink Slime' Sites Up To 70% Of the Time

Your chatbot's midterm answers may be citing junk sites

Mainstream AI chatbots are feeding voters outdated and partisan information about the midterms, and they're doing it with confidence. Mainstream chatbots cite 'pink slime' websites, which are partisan sites dressed up as local news, nearly 50 percent of the time on candidate and policy questions. That's a problem because around 8 percent of US adults have already used chatbots to research candidates ahead of the midterms. If you build anything that touches search, retrieval, or civic info, this is your warning. Retrieval pipelines pull from the same polluted pool of online sources, so grounding alone won't save you. Google's Gemini got the Pennsylvania mail-in ballot deadline wrong, and that deadline is October 27. Google's AI Mode also refused to return 2020 election results, even though those results are publicly available. The numbers are rough. ChatGPT cited pink slime sites in more than 70 percent of searches. xAI's Grok did it in 30 percent of cases. Nearly 40 percent of election answers from mainstream chatbots contained at least one factual error. Chatbots also make things up when they don't know, which is the worst combination here. Watch whether vendors add source-quality filtering or election-specific guardrails before November. Until then, treat any chatbot answer about candidates or deadlines as a starting point, not a source.