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“Our country would be safer without Somali immigrants — Starting with Ilhan Omar!” exclaims a January 7, 2026 Facebook post<\/a>, coupled with pictures of country music star Brandon Lake alongside Omar.\u00a0<\/p>\n Near identical posts<\/a> give more excerpts from Lake’s alleged speech<\/a> which suggests people should start speaking up for the “silent majority.”\u00a0<\/p>\n “This country welcomes people in good faith,” Lake supposedly said<\/a>. “But what we get in return — from some — is contempt for our culture, our values, and our Constitution.”<\/p>\n \t\t\tScreenshot of a Facebook post taken January 16, 2026 The posts encouraged users to read more in an article<\/a>\u00a0linked in the comment section.\u00a0<\/p>\n found duplicates of the text swapping out Lake for other country musicians such as Jason Aldean<\/a>, Reba McEntire<\/a> and Gretchen Wilson<\/a>, along with singer\u00a0Barbra Streisand<\/a>, and rapper\u00a050 Cent<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n \t\t\tScreenshot of a Facebook post taken January 21, 2026 \t\t\tScreenshot of a Facebook post taken January 21, 2026 ump administration has latched onto news of large-scale public benefit fraud<\/a> to target Omar and the large Somali community in Minnesota (archived here<\/a>). But\u00a0misinformation<\/a> about the Minnesota Democrat<\/a> and her\u00a0constituents<\/a> also regularly circulates.<\/p>\n On January 13, the United States said it would\u00a0end a special protected status<\/a> for Somalis, telling them they must leave the country by mid-March under an escalating crackdown on the community.\u00a0<\/p>\n The president has called Omar “garbage<\/a>,” but keyword<\/a>\u00a0searches<\/a> on Google yielded no credible evidence that any of the stars mentioned in the posts made the statement about the first African refugee elected<\/a> to Congress.\u00a0<\/p>\n Many of the Facebook accounts spreading the posts claimed to be based at US addresses but were in fact operated<\/a> from Vietnam, a common location for spam networks<\/a> seeking to profit off<\/a> of engagement.\u00a0<\/p>\n The account which posted on Lake is called Tune Nest<\/a>, and has more than 20,000 followers.\u00a0<\/p>\n Further review revealed that the articles<\/a> cited in the posts included unnatural English phrasing and homoglyphs — characters that look similar but are encoded differently — pointing to the use of artificial intelligence.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \t\t\tScreenshot of an AI-generated article captured on January 16, 2026 “The reason why these websites use homoglyphs on their text is to avoid being detected as having been AI-written and also to bypass automatic fake news detectors,” said\u00a0Aldan Creo<\/a>, a large language model researcher at the (archived here<\/a>), in a previous<\/a> interview with AFP on December 26, 2025.<\/p>\n Representatives of public figures targeted in the posts, such as Lake, Wilson and Alden did not respond to AFP’s requests for comment.<\/p>\n AFP previously debunked similar AI slop\u00a0here<\/a>, here<\/a>,\u00a0and\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source factcheck.afp.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “Our country would be safer without Somali immigrants — Starting with Ilhan Omar!” exclaims a January 7, 2026 Facebook post, coupled with pictures of country music star Brandon Lake alongside Omar.\u00a0 Near identical posts give more excerpts from Lake’s alleged speech which suggests people should start speaking up for the “silent majority.”\u00a0 “This country welcomes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2244935,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2244934","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/AI-generated-content-falsely-links-stars-to-anti-Somali-messages.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2244934","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2244934"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2244934\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2244936,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2244934\/revisions\/2244936"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2244935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2244934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2244934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2244934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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