In the old days, the grocery store checkout was your home for brain rot.

Bigfoot sightings, UFOs spotted, Bigfoot sightings on UFOs with Elvis and Tupac grabbing a ride. The trash tabloids had it all.

Now it’s all in your pocket.

And it’s Nick Saban, Jalen Hurts and Kalen DeBoer who’ve become the main characters in these viral tales for which there’s no vaccine.

We’re talking about these outrageously false Facebook posts that’ve taken over algorithms.

These posts dupe the same people who believed chain emails would save the world. They’re mostly harmless — laughable at times — but their virality further exposes the decay in our collective grip on reality and a lack of news literacy that extends beyond the sports posts we’re referencing.

If you’re reading this and have a Facebook presence, there’s no way you’ve missed these posts.

Like the one about Saban adopting an abandoned baby.

Or the one about an 8.5-foot-tall No. 1 recruit committing to Alabama.

Or the one about Alabama star receiver Ryan Williams turning down a $200 million NIL offer from Texas.

They often come with a gallery of the most outrageous Artificial Intelligence-generated photos that should trigger any BS meter. And yet, they can generate hundreds or thousands of interactions and comments.

The phenomenon is not exclusive to Alabama football, either. Pages dedicated to various teams, sports and general interests have popped up in what appears to be a network of foreign-based operations.

Take the page, ROLL TIDE Football, as an example. The page launched last fall has more than 8,000 followers. Its listed address on the info tab is a garbled mess, but when searched, it is the Gulf State Park Pavilion in Gulf Shores.

Bama Pride Hub (almost 5,000 followers) lists an address that’s actually the Stockyard Grill restaurant in Montgomery.

Look a little deeper on the required disclosures on their page and you see the administrators aren’t even based on this continent.

ROLL TIDE Football’s page manager is located in Nigeria. Bama Pide Hub’s manager had three managers in Vietnam and one in Australia.

Bama Legion Rising (7,100 followers) is also Vietnam-based. Touchdown Trib (6,500 followers) is too with four managers also located in the Philippines.

Several were created within days of each other in October and November of 2024.

These pages often share the same bogus stories and their intentions are clear. They’re designed to drive engagement (likes, hearts, comments) which helps it earn income directly from Facebook while helping its standing within the social network’s algorithm.

That virality leads to being suggested on more timelines and perpetuates this cycle.

These are mostly harmless lies and falsehoods designed to drive the conversation.

ROLL TIDE Football, for example, had a post May 25 claiming Kalen DeBoer “appointed” former Alabama star AJ McCarron as the Crimson Tide’s new QB coach. It came with an AI-generated photo of the two shaking hands and a link to a story page hosted on the site indiansports24 dot com.

The Facebook post has 6,200 likes and hearts, 672 comments and nearly 500 shares as of mid-June.

Others are designed to feed into political divisions that also germinate on social media. One post was shared dozens of times with different players and coaches listed as the main character who refuses to celebrate Pride Month while renouncing “woke” ideas. One falsely claiming Hurts said this has 3,500 interactions, 120-plus shares and 300-plus comments (only two of which state it’s fake).

The motives are less ideological and more economical.

And the sites these web pages are linked to are covered in ads that draw additional revenue for those behind these operations.

It could go even deeper than that.

When searched through a database of domain names, ROLL TIDE Football’s listed website is registered in Reykjavik, Iceland. The telephone number associated with the company has been linked to phishing schemes and other fraudulent activity, according to reports from the Better Business Bureau and even agencies within the United States federal government.

These false stories have even trickled into life outside of Facebook.

A caller to the Kalen DeBoer radio show in November was fooled by a Facebook post that claimed the coach’s wife was pregnant with their third child. He was a good sport about it, laughed, and acknowledged that call wasn’t the first he’s heard the made-up headline.

“The only reason I know is because I’ve got a lot of text messages saying congratulations,” DeBoer said on the Nov. 6 episode of the live, call-in show.

That hasn’t stopped the storyline from persisting on Facebook pages. Another one from Bama Pride Hub posted Nov. 18 and got 3,800 interactions. The same page posted the same story April 23 and got 163 interactions.

That begs the question: Why does Facebook allow these outrageous lies on its platform?

Well, its parent company in January announced it had eliminated third-party fact-checkers paid to tamp down misinformation in the name of ending “censorship.” Instead, it would be adding a crowd-sourced community note feature like on X (formerly Twitter) to combat misinformation. It remains in the testing phase.

There are also policies regarding AI-generated content. Meta “requires you to label content you share that has photorealistic video or realistic-sounding audio that has been digitally generated or altered, including with AI,” according to its website.

That’s clearly not enforced.

The policy also states that the site can detect AI-generated content and would add labels when found. That’s clearly not happening either.

AL.com requested comment from Meta after sending an example of these AI-generated posts, but the company did not respond before publication of this story. A company spokesperson responded to NPR in May 2024 for a story on the same topic.

“We work to reduce the spread of content that is spammy or sensational because we want users to have a good experience, which is why we offer them controls to what they see in their feed,” the Meta statement read.

Yet it continues. And the fake AI content output has only compounded since then.

Another subset of this universe is the Facebook groups that operate separately from the pages.

One named simply “Alabama football” has more than 145,000 members. None of the 16 administrators or managers appear to have legitimate profiles while sharing some of the same nonsensical fake stories.

One admin with the name “Alabama Beautiful” shares a mixture of photos lifted from other sites and laughably false stories. One from early June claimed quarterback Ty Simpson donated $450,000 to the Alabama football program accompanied by a headshot of a player who isn’t Simpson. Another on June 7 announced Alabama unveiled a statue of Saban … the same statue that’s stood outside Bryant-Denny Stadium since 2011.

Or a post repeated a few times on “Alabama Crimson Tide Football Talk” that claimed Mark Ingram was coming back to the program with a photo of current Tide safety Bray Hubbard. It’s safe to say the two would never be confused visually.

The mind-numbing examples are countless.

AL.com attempted to reach the Alabama Beautiful account, but messages sent through Facebook went unanswered. Messages sent to the listed email accounts of several pages bounced back as undeliverable.

Not everyone is fooled, and there’s growing pushback within the comments of these insane posts. Even the Meta AI summaries of comments with high engagement acknowledge it.

“Commenters are skeptical about the post’s validity,” reads one summary below clearly fake photos of a sorrowful Hurts sitting next to an ailing Saban in a hospital bed, “citing inconsistencies in the photo, such as Jalen Hurts’ hands and Nick Saban’s oxygen tube. Many believe it’s AI-generated and not a real update on Saban’s health, noting that legitimate news would be widely reported.”

Still, 1,300-plus users hit the thumbs up, heart or the caring response under the post.

And the cycle continues.

Again, we’re talking about mostly frivolous subject matters and largely harmless lies.

Yet it exposes the potential to deceive a captive audience not always equipped to spot even the most obvious lies.

It erodes user confidence in legitimate news on the platform when forced to coexist with clickbait scams with no oversight from Facebook.

Bigfoot is back.

He’s riding the Loch Ness Monster and waving to Elvis and all it took was an internet connection in Vietnam.

Michael Casagrande is a reporter for the Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @ByCasagrande or on Facebook.