Over the weekend, Richland County Councilman Jason Branham’s wife sent him a text.
“You’re going to want to address this,” she wrote. Attached was a story from an entertainment news site named TVOvermind claiming that Branham was a suspect in a possible murder.
The details in the article were spare but salacious. The story, written by Steve Delickson, claimed Branham had been taken in for questioning by local police following the mysterious death of a woman whose body had been discovered during a wellness check. It was an astonishing scoop for TVOvermind, which normally churns out short features on movies and television.
But none of it was true.
“This is NOT a real story,” the Richland County Sheriff’s Department posted on its Facebook page, three days after the story ran.
But that hasn’t stopped the story from spreading. People have been reaching out to Branham’s wife to ask if she’s O.K., said Branham, whose county phone number and P.O. Box were also included in the story.
Under a closer examination, the story’s few details don’t stand up to scrutiny. Key facts like dates and addresses are not included. No officials or law enforcement spokespeople are named.
Photos, including that of former Dallas Police Chief Reneé Hall and of an eviction in Milwaukee, appear to have been chosen at random. A reverse image search traced two mugshots included in the article to unrelated incidents: a shooting at a Ramadan event in Philadelphia earlier this year and the murder of a Charlotte woman, shot sitting in her car, in 2023.
The article also made vague and puzzling statements, including, “reports have not covered any specific reactions from neighbors or local residents which might have provided valuable insight into how this tragedy is affecting the community on a personal level.”
“I’m left with so many questions,” Branham said. “Was the content submitted locally? Was this someone who was a bad actor who was trying to defame me? Was this bad AI?”
But the truth may in fact be far stranger.
Because unraveling the mystery of why a website defamed a Richland County Council member is to take a journey into the history of the internet. It is the story of how a scrappy television blog, founded in the early days of online journalism, slowly transformed, owner by owner, into a hollow shell of itself — a content mill based in Lithuania producing hundreds of stories a day in a bid to drive clicks.
Following an email from The State, TVOvermind took the story down.
But what happened is part of a trend that has turbo-charged defamation, said Jay Bender, a South Carolina lawyer who specializes in media and First Amendment law.
“It doesn’t make any difference from a legal perspective if it’s generated by a AI or a human being sitting behind a keyboard, what matters is that they defamed him,” said Bender, who has represented The State.
“An excellent resource”
At first glance, Delickson’s story on Branham could pass for a rush job, thrown together by a journalist writing on deadline. And who could blame him for being rushed? On Saturday, July 6, the day that the article about Brenham was posted online, Delickson’s account published 205 other stories on TVOvermind.
But a search for the writer Steve Delickson yielded no results other than his work on TVOvermind.
His author bio includes no biographical details, simply stating: “I cover updates on the latest celebrity gossip, TV show ratings, and interviews with actors and actresses from popular shows. I also do recaps of episodes and predictions for future storylines. My articles are an excellent resource for television fans looking to stay up-to-date on the latest happenings in the entertainment industry.”
Other stories that Delickson published Saturday included a first look at a new Game of Thrones prequel on HBO, Meghan Markle’s “surprising” rivalry with Victoria Beckham and a round-up of “must watch” July TV. But sprinkled in there were stories about cocaine busts in Ohio, a Virginia man who received a 45-year sentence for killing his son and a story about an infant left in a hot car.
The crime stories are uniformly short, vague and full of both errors and terms that are likely to be picked up by online search engines. The story about the infant left in the car begins, errors included, “a desperate situation unraveled when a shopping mother in [City Name] left her 4-year-old child in a sweltering car.”
The content is a far cry from TVOvermind set out to do when it was launched in 2008 as part of Zap2it, a website that provided film and television listings.
TVOvermind’s mission was to produce high quality writing on film and television, said Mike Chace, an early partner who came to own the site in 2012.
The “playbook” for the site came from Jon Lachonis, a blogger who rose to internet fame writing about the hit TV show Lost, Chace said. The show became a global phenomenon in part due to the novel world of online fandom, where the line between fan and professional writer was blurred by writers like Lachonis who wrote obsessively about the show.
Lachonis helped direct the site in its early days, but after he “disappeared” in 2012, Chace said that his company, CB Media, acquired TVOvermind. Chace described the site as small but scrappy, and remembers that they took their shot at competing with legacy media and even sent writers to conventions as credentialed press.
But in 2017, Chace sold the site to Uncoached, owned by Nat Berman, for $50,000. Under Berman, the site took a very different approach.
In 2019, TVOvermind was accused of widespread plagiarism after New York Magazine editor Megh Wright found that one of its writers had copied a story published in Vulture on perennial Simpson’s punching bag, Hans Moleman. Wright’s investigation, detailed in a thread on Twitter (now known as X), revealed that the site was engaged in wide scale theft of content from sites including Comic Book Resources, better known as CBR, and ScreenRant.
The site also relied on using free labor from writers who were promised exposure and “notoriety” for producing a high volume of content, Wright and others said.
Following these revelations, TVOvermind’s official Twitter account issued an apology . While posts defended the site’s right to aggregate content, they promised that writers and editors would do a better job of crediting their sources.
“I take FULL responsibility for the lack of supervision on these pieces,” read one post on TVOvermind’s Twitter at the time.
But in 2020, Uncoached was sued twice in federal court for alleged intellectual property theft after publishing copyrighted photos. One case was settled, the other was dismissed by plaintiffs, according to court records.
On his website, Berman included TVOvermind as an example in a slide deck on how to flip digital “real estate,” which he called an “undervalued” asset class. According to Berman’s slides, the site averaged between $300,000 to $500,000 in revenue between 2015 and 2022.
In August 2022, Berman sold the site to Lithuanian website Bored Panda for more than three times its valuation. Founded in 2009 by Tomas Banišauskas, a business student at the University of Vilnius in Lithuania, Bored Panda produces viral, feel-good content to drive web traffic for advertising revenue.
“Looks like they’re going heavy on trying to get into Google News,” Berman told The State when asked about the story. “I haven’t talked to anyone over there in ages. I pay zero attention.”
In response to an email from The State, a representative of TVOvermind said that Branham’s inclusion in the article came from a “random AI mixup.” The article was produced by “syndicating” a June 19 story from local TV station WIS. However, the WIS article about a woman found dead during a welfare check made no mention of Branham.
“Our site is only syndicating content from the source article... there were some inconsistencies, so we have removed the syndication from our end,” wrote the unnamed representative, who did not answer any questions about Delickson or the site’s editorial policy.
Delickson’s profile has since been wiped from TVOvermind. His stories can now by found under the byline “trending news.”
With the website now based overseas, Bender, the media lawyer, sees little recourse for victims of defamation from sites like TVOvermind.
“You can always file a lawsuit,” Bender said, “but jurisdiction is going to be an issue going forwards.”
Brenham said that along with some colleagues, he’s considered whether there was any legislation that could be passed to try to stop this in future. But he acknowledged that he wasn’t sure how successful that would be in stopping these kinds of organizations.
“It’s a leading edge technology issue,” Brenham said. “If it could happen to me it could happen to anybody.”
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