r/Mainepolitics

Ellsworth seems so in your face politically polarized and toxic. I know part if it is John Linnehan, but it just seems so extreme there, especially those stupid trucks or enormous signs people put up. Plus you had that whole petition to remove the city council members. Why is Ellsworth like this? Are other "cities" in Maine like this too?

For those paywalled :

The Twin Cities Media investigative report was damning: Maine was shutting down 35 healthcare agencies after the federal government found $100 million in MaineCare fraud.

The breaking story, with brand-new “investigative findings,” was proof-of-concept for the one-month-old news site. Systemic issues in MaineCare had been “previously uncovered” by Twin Cities Media, the story boasted, and its reporters, who secured comments from Maine political leaders on both sides of the aisle, had succeeded in making change.

Except the Twin Cities Media post contained multiple errors, fabricated sources and came two days after most Maine news outlets published a scaled back, reality-based version of the same story.

So, too, was the attached cartoon image, which listed the vague credit: “By The Twin Cities Media Investigative Team – [Current Date].” And so were most other posts on the Facebook page. And so was every image on its fledgling website.

Its listed reporters, Carlos Mendez and Grace Whitfield and Maryam Hassan and Daniel Okonkwo, who supposedly report in four languages, are not real. The catchy headlines on its website are not clickable. But Twin Cities Media advertises an $8 per month — or $80 per year — subscription offer, anyway, all in support of an organization that lists accountability and transparency as its top two priorities.

Its Facebook posts, which appear to be the only way to read their “reporting,” sometimes get hundreds of likes and comments, especially on Lewiston-Auburn-area news.

Paywall-free, editorially derelict and tuned for social media engagement, AI local news is exploding online in Maine in the age of the attention-grabbing algorithm and declining trust in legacy media. While some avid news readers are skeptical of these sites, others engage unknowingly, with the sometimes misleading, often inaccurate content. Experts say AI news is straining an already-fraying information ecosystem across Maine and the U.S.

Beyond Twin Cities Media, there’s the Portland Post, which prints apparently AI-scraped versions of political stories with a conservative tilt. There’s also the AI-driven Maine Mirror, a purportedly investigative site run by a prominent social media conservative. There’s even hyperlocal investigative pages, like Small Town Accountability in Kennebec County, covering Vassalboro’s local government with ChatGPT as its chief editor. And there’s Laid Back Local, an AI-voiced weekly-ish podcast scraping Maine’s biggest stories.

“(Local AI news) is making it harder to navigate and find information that is real, or know what is real,” Lynn Walsh, the assistant director of the national journalism research group Trusting News, said. “That is the broader impact here.”

A request for an interview with Twin Cities Media’s was declined, but a reporter received an emailed statement that said the site uses “advanced automated technologies and artificial intelligence to assist in gathering, structuring, and formatting our content,” including both articles and images. (This email contained characteristics of an AI-written response.)

“Our processes are designed to filter and verify data points before publication, ensuring that our automated output serves as an informative, reliable community resource rather than a source of unsubstantiated claims,” the statement continued.

The outlet did not respond to follow-up questions about who works for Twin Cities Media, its editorial or fact-checking processes, the reporter names on its website and the lack of disclosure about the use of AI on its social media or website.

The author of the statement signed the email, “editorial moderator.”

HOW TO TELL

This is the thing — AI-driven news sites and social media pages rarely disclose their use of AI.

Like those published by Twin Cities Media on social media, stories by the Maine Mirror — a site with “Truth. Accountability. Transparency.” as its slogan — use only AI-generated images and all the well-studied hallmarks of AI writing.

There’s bullet points and three-item lists.

There’s unadventurous, surgical vocabulary, perfect grammar and a distinct lack of human humor.

There’s punchy, repetitive one-line paragraphs.

But while Ryan Michaels, the conservative commentator behind the site, often reposts the Maine Mirror’s articles and shares his own AI-written monologues, nowhere on the site or social media does he openly discuss or disclose his use of AI in publishing the Maine Mirror.

On his personal Facebook page, he only mentions AI use in an advertisement for a mental health chatbot he set up in 2024, and in an apparently AI-written post about his adoption of the technology, which he said has changed “and even saved” his life.

The telltale sign of an AI publication, Walsh from Trusting News said, is its lack of transparency.

For starters, the Maine Mirror, Twin Cities Media and Portland Post seldom disclose on their websites or social media any use of AI.

News outlets will also usually list reporters, editors, photographers and advertising staff all on their website. She said AI-driven outlets often don’t — take Twin Cities Media’s unnamed “editorial moderator,” for example, or the Portland Post’s nondescript bylines — because there’s rarely more than one or two real people behind the scenes.

“The pushback at this basic level should be, ‘Well, no, but like, who are you?'” Walsh said. “There might be some good reasons why some people don’t want to share their identity, but then there should be some explanation shared about it. These AI accounts aren’t doing that. They’re just kind of giving you very bland, generic answers of titles, numbers, ethics codes, which they can scrape — nothing that’s personal or real.”

The lack of transparency goes deep. Real deep.

Walsh said she’s seeing more AI accounts, especially on social media, focusing on local news in San Diego, where she lives, without ever citing on-the-ground reporting. It’s a national phenomenon now, she said — AI accounts scraping traditionally reported news and repackaging it for social media engagement without named sources or documents.

It’s happening in Maine, too. Twin Cities Media’s Aug. 7 MaineCare “investigative report,” for example, cited sources who had been “blindsided” by the funding suspensions. The page said it found that “even workers successfully transitioning to new healthcare providers are facing immediate financial hardship.”

None of the workers were named. Nor were their agencies. Nor were their hardships specified. The sources and their stories appear to be fabricated — or, to use the proper AI term, hallucinated.

“There’s been an unfathomable amount of garbage on the internet for generations, and I think that the rise of AI just sort of supercharges that,” said Dan MacLeod, the president of the Maine Press Association Board of Directors and the executive editor of the Bangor Daily News. “That means that you can do it at a scale that was unheard of before.”

Often, the stories posted by AI outlets take from other news sources without credit.

On July 27, Twin Cities Media scraped a Sun Journal article about the potential for revival at the Auburn Mall. The post’s first paragraph included the same reference to the 1979 opening of the mall and almost exactly the same comparison to New York City that Sun Journal reporter Christopher Wheelock wrote.

The note at the bottom of the Twin Cities Media post, which continued to closely resemble Wheelock’s story, said: “WE COVER THE STORIES CORPORATE MEDIA MISSES.”

Occasionally, these outlets’ AI can hallucinate entire stories.

The Portland Post published a story in February recognizing Eventide Oyster Co.’s chef Andrew Taylor for his nomination for the 2026 James Beard Best Chef: Northeast award. While he and his co-owner Mike Wiley won the award in 2017, they were not nominated this spring — and nominations were not made public until about a month and a half after the Portland Post’s supposed announcement.

The apparently AI-written post even includes what appears to be an entirely fabricated quote from Taylor.

Walsh said she encourages readers to double-check when an article or social media post or image doesn’t feel quite right. Look at their website to see if there are people behind the post. Check bylines and photos for real names and faces. If you have the time, look up specific numbers or claims made.

“If you cannot verify who is behind the content, that should be a red flag to you to say, ‘OK, one, you know what, I’m not going to follow them regularly. Two, I’m going to verify what they’re saying or what they’re sharing elsewhere,'” Walsh said.

The Portland Post did not respond to questions about the identities of the people behind the publication or the publication’s reporting process. The Maine Mirror did not respond to a request for an interview.

AI AND TRUST

Avid news consumers are wary of the use of AI in journalism.

Trusting News has conducted several surveys with the audiences of news outlets nationwide that show this: about one-third of those news consumers said journalists shouldn’t use AI at all, and about 60% said journalists should only use AI under clear guidelines and policies.

First and foremost, those readers say they want transparency about the use of AI, she said. About 95% of surveyed readers said newsrooms should be open about their use of AI in reporting and writing, and that it was very important to them that newsrooms do so.

But those surveys may have a bias, she said. Mostly, it’s the avid news consumers who engage with surveys about AI disclosure and its use in reporting and writing.

The average news consumer — someone who might only click on a news story once a week, or usually scrolls on social media to stay informed about the world — may not be able to tell if writing looks AI-generated in the first place.

“Most people, scrolling through your feed or your timeline, and you see something that pops up — looks like news to me,” MacLeod, the Maine Press Association board president, said. “A lot of people engage with news that way. There’s a concern about the devaluing of of real journalism and the commodification of it.”

MacLeod said the Maine Press Association, an organization representing Maine’s newsrooms, has yet to receive specific complaints about the proliferation of these AI scraping sites, but that there’s no doubt they will continue to grow.

In just a month, Twin Cities Media has posted hundreds of times and gained 1,500 followers on Facebook. The Portland Post’s Instagram account has almost 3,700 people following it, with short-form videos sometimes reaching tens of thousands of viewers.

More attention on aggregated, scraped AI content presents an opportunity for news organizations to step up, MacLeod said. Real, deeply reported, human journalism, he said, is even more valuable now, in an age where information is instant.

“We’re humans,” he said. “We’re reporters. We know to ask questions. We know what the audience cares about. You can see our faces.”

This morning the Portland Press Herald and Houston Chronicle published a joint editorial calling on Sens. Susan Collins, Angus King, John Cornyn and Ted Cruz to press DHS for answers and ensure meaningful independent oversight following ICE fatally shooting Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine. Here is a key quote:

>All Americans, from Houston to Maine, urgently need to be reassured that armed federal agents are not above the law. All of us know well that law enforcement should be accountable to the people. It is part of our nation’s founding, written into history that every American schoolchild learns — a story not from Houston or Maine, but Boston. 

>In the spring of 1770, in response to jeers, spitting and flying objects, a handful of British soldiers opened fire on an angry crowd of American patriots, killing five. Eight redcoats, arrested and charged with murder, were defended in court by John Adams. Two were ultimately convicted of manslaughter. The law, Adams told the court, “will not bend to the uncertain wishes, imaginations and wanton tempers of men.” 

>Colonists under the rule of King George III could expect more transparency and more commitment to justice than Americans can expect under President Donald Trump. 

>Where are the arrests? Where is the trial? Where is the justice? 

>We cannot let these tragedies fade into mere headlines. 

>If our representatives cannot insist on real accountability, voters need to elect new ones.

r/ Maine deleted this because I haven’t given my email to Reddit, so I came here 🙂.

What are you guy doing? Why would you publicly say these things?

Okay so we all know housing code with new builds is pretty intense. For those who aren’t aware, a newer building style of making super air tight homes with tons of insulation and triple layer windows is kind of nuts. It’s actively making housing affordable for younger Mainers who are choosing to leave the state due to a shortage of job and housing opportunities.

Now how is it that I can buy a house from like 1880-1920 and be grandfathered into the old code but if I wanted to build a new, safer, and better home but it will cost almost triple per square footage. What’s the deal?

Is it designed so poor people get stuck with unsafe/outdated housing so it’s their responsibility to fix it? All I’m saying is there should be some compromise with new builds as in, maybe thy should still allow houses to breath a little and maybe not be concerned with the r-value when half the ton is living in drafty homes with outdated wiring, plumbing, etc