On April 11, 2024, Esspots.com published an article positing that the Grand Ole Opry, the 99-year-old country music venue in Nashville, Tennessee, had banned Beyoncé for life because she is "not country." The article began as follows:
Breaking: The Grand Ole Opry Bans Beyoncé For Life, "Go Play Dress-Up, You're Not Country"
In a surprising and polarizing move, the Grand Ole Opry has announced that global music icon Beyoncé has been banned for life from performing at the iconic venue. The decision comes amidst a wave of criticism and debate over the boundaries of country music and the representation of diverse musical styles within the genre. Let's delve into the details of this controversial ban and the broader implications it raises for the country music industry.
The article was shared onto a Facebook page called SpaceX Fanclub, where it gained more than 100,000 reactions and 16,000 comments, many of which implied the users thought the post was real. Snopes also received requests from readers asking us to fact-check the post.
The name SpaceX Fanclub may ring a bell for some long-time Snopes readers as being strikingly similar to the (now-defunct) Facebook page SpaceX Lovers, which Snopes fact-checked countless times for sharing "satirical" news articles.
Indeed, Esspots.com and the SpaceX Fanclub Facebook page are also satire sites, and the Beyoncé article in question (and everything else on the sites) is not based in reality.
The SpaceX Fanclub Facebook page has an introduction section reading "We post SATIRE, nothing on this page is real." Esspots.com has an about page that also explains that its content should not be taken seriously.
Welcome to the US page of Esspots (A Subsidiary of SpaceXMania.com specializing in Satire and Parody News), your one-stop destination for satirical news and commentary about the United States of America. Our team of writers and editors is dedicated to bringing you the latest and greatest in fake news and absurdity, all with a healthy dose of humor and satire.
On this page, you can expect to find all sorts of hilarious stories and parodies about US politics, culture, and society. From outrageous conspiracy theories to outlandish political stunts, we've got it all covered.
Note the reference to SpaceXMania.com in the about page — another satirical news site that Snopes has frequently fact-checked.
After reading through the article, we began to suspect that it was written by an AI tool like ChatGPT. For instance, the article uses the word "delve," a favorite of AI language models, within the first paragraph, and its final paragraph started with "in conclusion." Plus, for an article about Beyoncé making country music, it was quite strange to make no mention of the singer's March 2024 country album "Cowboy Carter." Instead, it only mentioned a "recent foray into country music with her song 'Daddy Lessons,' featured on her critically acclaimed album 'Lemonade.'" That album was released in 2016, eight years before the article was published.
If the article was written by a model like ChatGPT, this would make sense. AI programs are not always equipped with the ability to provide up-to-date information. In order to test our theory, Snopes started a new session with ChatGPT and asked repeatedly about "Cowboy Carter" and other topical news items. It was never able to confirm the album's existence.
With this in mind, we ran the text of the article through a variety of AI detector sites in order to get a wide range of opinions. Most, but not all, of the sites agreed that the article was not written by a human.
This is not the first time Snopes has checked stories originating from this particular combination of satire news site and Facebook page — we previously checked two different stories about Tim Allen and a third about Taylor Swift. All were untrue.
For background, here is why we sometimes write about satire/humor.