NewsBreak, the most downloaded news app in the United States, has come under fire for publishing fake news stories generated by AI and its ties to China, raising concerns about the spread of misinformation and data privacy.
Reuters reports that popular news app NewsBreak, which has offices in Mountain View, California, Beijing, and Shanghai, recently published an alarming but entirely false story about a Christmas Day shooting in Bridgeton, New Jersey. The local police department dismissed the AI-generated article as “fiction” in a Facebook post on December 27. NewsBreak eventually removed the inaccurate story four days after publication, attributing the error to the content source.
As local news outlets across America have struggled in recent years, NewsBreak has become an option to fill the void, boasting over 50 million monthly users. The app publishes licensed content from media outlets and rewrites information scraped from the internet using AI. However, Reuters found that NewsBreak’s use of AI tools has led to the publication of at least 40 fake news stories since 2021, affecting the communities it aims to serve.
In addition to false news stories, NewsBreak has faced copyright infringement lawsuits from local news providers, including Patch Media and Emmerich Newspapers, for republishing content without permission or credit. The app has also been criticized for creating stories under fictitious bylines, a practice that former consultant Norm Pearlstine warned could “destroy the NewsBreak brand.”
NewsBreak’s ties to China have also raised concerns. The app was initially launched as a subsidiary of Yidian, a Chinese news aggregation app, and both companies were founded by Jeff Zheng, NewsBreak’s CEO. Although Yidian divested from NewsBreak in 2019, the two companies share a U.S. patent for an “Interest Engine” algorithm. About half of NewsBreak’s 200 employees, including a significant portion of its engineering staff, are based in China.
The app’s use of China-based engineers has raised questions about the potential access to American user data in China, drawing comparisons to the recent controversy surrounding TikTok. NewsBreak maintains that it complies with U.S. data and privacy laws and stores data on U.S.-based Amazon servers, with staff in China only accessing anonymous data.
Read more at Reuters here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.
