Hamish Macdonald

Wow.

because they'd seen it, someone had referred them to it.

And you can see how this stuff takes fire.

And it particularly takes, catches a light during periods of confusion or acute, you know, distress.

Late last year, we started getting regular calls and texts on my morning show asking us, why aren't you covering the new road rules that are coming into force this week?

And

there was this huge glut of information cycling through social media pages, but also with links to articles on, you know, when you like see a newspaper link and it looks like a real newspaper, when you click through, it's like slightly different.

version of that newspaper.

Like might be a few words different.

So you have to be looking kind of closely to see that it's.

And so there was a lot of these articles supporting the social media clips or linked to them that people were then reading, detailing all of these new road rules that Australia was introducing.

And the main ones that we were hearing about were that I think it was people over 60 or 65 weren't allowed to drive at night anymore, that you had to have your headlights on 24 hours a day.

And the other one was that you could be fined for taking a sip of water while you drive.

And the articles and posts were referring to a specific date in the back half of last year.

And so listeners rightly were wondering why we weren't covering it.

What was really interesting was that our producers were then going and searching this because it seemed like a big thing that we should be covering.

And when they went to Google, the AI, the Gemini Google function was throwing up results based on the fake stories as if they were out there.

Yeah, because the AI tools are just sort of scraping the available information.

And so they were picking this up.

I ended up running, I was at Parliament House for an ABC thing and ran into the Federal Transport Minister, Catherine King, and was talking to her about it and she was like, oh, my God, this has been going on for so long.