Artificial intelligence–generated news pages are attracting significant engagement from New Zealand social media users, raising concerns among journalists, academics, and emergency authorities about misinformation, public safety, and declining trust in legitimate news outlets.
A 1News investigation identified at least 10 Facebook pages that republish existing New Zealand news stories after rewriting them with AI and pairing them with synthetic images. The posts are presented as news but lack disclosure about automation or image fabrication.
NZ News Hub reviewed 209 posts published in January alone. The page has more than 4,700 followers and regularly attracts more than 1,000 likes and comments per post. Its name closely resembles the now-defunct broadcaster Newshub, which closed in 2024, but the page has no apparent link to any newsroom and does not produce original reporting.
The investigation found that none of the images used by the page were labelled as AI-generated, despite several depicting fabricated scenes involving real people.
There is an image of a minor killed in the Mount Maunganui landslide that was manipulated to show her dancing. In another video circulating online, parents who had lost their teenage daughter to suicide were altered to appear affectionate.
Natural disasters and emergency events were repeatedly exaggerated, with crushed houses, damaged vehicles, and inflated passenger numbers added to real incidents. Police were often shown wearing foreign uniforms or carrying firearms, despite no such details appearing in official releases.
Some posts mistakenly included raw AI prompts such as, “Here’s a news-style rewrite with a clear headline, emojis, and top hashtags.” When challenged by users over an AI-generated image, the page responded: “The news is true.”
Civil defence groups have warned that such pages pose risks during crises. Gisborne District Council and Tairāwhiti Civil Defence said they were aware of pages “pretending to be news outlets and sharing AI-generated images and made-up content about local events and emergencies.”
“Accurate information matters, especially during an emergency response. Let’s keep our community safe and well-informed,” the agencies said.
The National Emergency Management Agency echoed the concern. “It is important that the public has trust and confidence in reliable and accurate emergency information channels,” it said, adding that “in an emergency, our primary channel to get information out to the public is the media.”
AUT associate professor Merja Myllylahti said the pages recycle legitimate information but undermine credibility by adding fake visuals. “They take obviously legitimate news from police notifications or press releases… but then they create AI images that are not real, and they are not labelled,” she said.
Victoria University AI lecturer Andrew Lensen said such pages are “nearly always fully automated,” warning that “even though the underlying story might be true, details may not be accurate.”
The trend comes as trust in news remains fragile, with only 32% of New Zealanders saying they trust it, according to AUT’s Trust in News survey. Meta did not respond to questions by deadline.