Facebook Is Swamped With AI Articles About Your Favourite Celebrities Being Homophobic

If you’ve made the mistake of being on Facebook recently, you may have seen some of the world’s biggest celebrities saying extremely homophobic things, endorsing Trump, performing for homeless veterans, and also dying of terminal illnesses – often all in the same week. It’s not true, but thousands of people eat it all up, like a vacuum cleaner in a dark dusty corner.

The AI slop era has hit Facebook, and unfortunately it’s extremely successful.

You may have noticed a trend on Facebook of extremely viral posts featuring recognisable celebrities, often holding up cardboard signs with a simple call to action on them. It can be anything like “do you still listen to my music?” or “pray for me”.

These are, and we need to get this clear immediately, not real. They are AI confections, and not even particularly good ones. We need to be clear because unfortunately the tech-illiterate denizens of Facebook do not understand this.

A recent one on the fake Cher fan page “Turn Back Time” features an AI generated image of Cher holding a sign saying “Do you still miss Olivia Newton-John? Be honest”, with the star standing next to Cliff Richards and being haunted by the ghost of a young Olivia Newton John. Another features her sitting in a wheelchair with a sign saying “Stroke took my legs and maybe my career. Will you still stand by me?”. The comments are full of people saying “yes, absolutely” and posting Bitmojis with crying faces, with only a handful of people able to identify that this is wildly fake.

Even if Cher did miss Olivia Newton-John, why would she hold up a cardboard sign? And why wouldn’t she be scared of the ghost? And why did Cliff Richards bake a cake?

A swarm of fan pages

There are a lot of weird pages on Facebook, and in isolation, an AI slop fan account for Cher would barely be worth noting. Where it gets interesting is the fact that it’s not an isolated page, and seemingly hundreds of celebrity fan pages have been set up, all pumping out the exact same formula of AI slop. It’s also a departure from an earlier proliferation of fake celebrity accounts, which are used to perpetuate scams.

Once you start seeing them, you’ll see the same cardboard signs, the same semi-news headline format, and the same lists of tragedies and issues spread amongst them all. In a brief search, I’ve found a Tom Jones page called Oldies Nostalgia, Billy Bob Thornton page called Thornton Film Legacy, Rob Zombie, Pink, Steve Perry, Dwight Yoakam, Mick Jagger, Johnny Depp, Kurt Russell, and about a hundred American country music stars who I’ve never heard of. All of whom are suffering fatal diseases, paying tribute to other dead celebrities, and asking you to pray for them.

While it’s impossible to verify, it’s immediately clear that the same guiding hand is behind all of these pages and posts, such is the similarity between them. It could be another incarnation of the Russian bot farms that are pumping out misinformation online.

“The social media bot farm used elements of AI to create fictitious social media profiles — often purporting to belong to individuals in the United States — which the operators then used to promote messages in support of Russian government objectives,” said the US government Department of Justice back in 2024.

The pages, despite being phenomenally fake, usually have large followings.

Pink is not a dead homophobic MAGA supporter

While AI images of celebrities hanging out with ghosts is objectively funny, you have to wonder why Russian bot farms (if that’s who is behind this) would bother pumping them out at an insane volume, with most of the pages regurgitating multiple posts per day.

But that’s where we get to the culture war element- with all these celebrities apparently taking an extremely right wing turn. A common post across all these pages is sudden support for US President Donald Trump and the military.

One of the common fake “articles” quotes Cher, Pink, Pedro Pascal and half a dozen other celebrities as saying: “Donald Trump is a tough man. He can be brash, outspoken, and unapologetic. But in my lifetime, no one has fought harder for the heart and soul of America.”

This is easily debunked, but are full of comments of people, usually MAGA supporters, celebrating this news.

There’s also a strong anti-LGBTQIA+ sentiment across these posts, with child safeguarding and anti-trans propaganda being common. One of the most viral and repeated posts is fake news about celebrities being “boycotted” for saying children should not be exposed to cartoons featuring LGBTQ themes.

“Boycott Debate: Mick Jagger Faces Online Backlash” says a post.
“Some fans say they are boycotting rock legend Mick Jagger after comments circulating online claimed he said children should not be exposed to cartoons featuring LGBTQ themes.”

The comments are full of people expressing their support for the “cancelled” celebrity – showing how effective this kind of fake news is.

“I sit and watch the children play / kids had less mental health issues then today// Mick might be right might be Wrong I don’t know the world not the same as back then seems to go faster as we go forward or older/take it easy,” says one commenter.

“I believe that he is right and for every one in disagreement I believe there 100 fans that agree,” says another.

Robert Plant.

Always super cool. pic.twitter.com/pl4oh02zoe

— Melinda Richards 🇦🇺🇺🇸 (@goodfoodgal) March 16, 2026

It’s all pretty easy to see that it’s all a very effective rage-bait tool, but other than racking up large Facebook audiences and potentially profiting off ad revenue on the fake pages that these images link to, it’s unclear what the broader purpose is. There are obviously any number of well-funded organisations and groups that want to spread fake news about the LGBTQIA+ community and support for Donald Trump.

These posts also make it off platform, with right-wing influencers showing how easily fake news can spread.

Facebook is a cesspit

Facebook, once a staple for online communication and poking, and default for organising events in real life, has been in a gradual but extremely noticeable decline for years now.

Once the biggest social media platform in the world, Facebook’s popularity reached a tipping point and started to slow down, losing users in the younger demographic, who are abandoning it for other social media sites, such as TikTok and Instagram. It seems to be dominated almost entirely by confused boomers on community pages asking if anyone knows why a helicopter is circling nearby, and pages absolutely spewing out misinformation.

But misinformation has been a constant problem on the platform, with fake news and foreign interference even being credited as helping elect Donald Trump the first time around. It doesn’t help that after Trump’s re-election, Facebook’s owner Meta announced it would abandon its fact-checking program. It was aimed at preventing the spread of online lies among more than 3 billion people who use Meta’s social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Threads.

The COVID pandemic demonstrated the usefulness of independent fact checking on Facebook. Fact checkers helped curb much harmful misinformation and disinformation about the virus and the effectiveness of vaccines.

According to The Conversation,  Meta’s fact-checking program also served as a backbone to global efforts to fight misinformation on other social media platforms. It facilitated financial support to up to 90 accredited fact-checking organisations around the world.

In a video, the company’s chief, Mark Zuckerberg, said fact checking had led to “too much censorship”.

Meta has also faced pressure from politicians and regulators in the past few years to tackle the plague of scams featuring deepfake images of public figures such as David Koch, Gina Rinehart, Anthony Albanese, Larry Emdur, Guy Sebastian and others which are used to promote investment scams.

The company is being sued by the mining magnate Andrew Forrest over the company’s alleged failure to tackle scams using his image.

Star Observer has reached out to Meta for comment on this latest AI scourge.

**This article features multiple AI images as examples. Star Observer does not use generative AI for its articles or image creation.