BNN Breaking claims to be a global news organization with hundreds of reporters worldwide who publish many news articles daily. However, there is reason to believe this website parses information and news from other websites. Now, Google has come after it.
So, what is BNN Breaking? They say: “Founded by visionary entrepreneur Gurbaksh Chahal, BNN Breaking represents a paradigm shift in the news arena.” Wikipedia has a different take: “It has been criticized for posting several misleading and inaccurate news stories, potentially using AI-driven content aggregation.”
This “news website” was founded by serial entrepreneur Gurbaksh Chahal (you can learn more about him here). In 2013, he was charged and convicted in San Francisco of domestic assault and battery against his then-girlfriend and sentenced to three years probation.
BNN Breaking has been in trouble before. In 2022, Twitter deleted almost 80 accounts associated with BNN Network. In 2023, the site published several fake news stories attributing San Francisco Supervisor Dean Preston to words he didn’t say. That same year, they claimed that Irish broadcaster Dave Fanning was on trial for alleged sexual misconduct. BNN has also plowed through restaurants in South Boston and New Hampshire.
But what matters most is the speed at which hundreds and thousands of news stories are published. That speed, better than anything else, indicated that BNN uses some trick to generate thousands of articles daily. BNN “correspondent” Geeta Pillai alone wrote 48,623 articles between September 23, 2023, and March 8, 2024. That is an average of 291 articles per day.
The account labeled BNN Correspondents has published 274,276 articles since January 11, 2023. That is an impressive 650 articles per day. I’m not talking about the other BNN “correspondents” who published thousands of news articles daily, with an interval of 2-10 minutes.
Almost every article followed a simple writing pattern: an introduction and three paragraphs. Most of the articles didn’t contain references to sources or other information.
At the same time, BNN Breaking continued to be indexed by Google Search and shown in Google News, attracting 7.8 million visitors in February, according to SimilarWeb.
Now it feels like it’s come to an end. When I last checked the BNN Breaking site in Google’s index, it included 5.6 million pages from their website. Now, there are 0 pages left in the index. And it no longer shows up in Google News.
We have not been able to get a comment from Mr. Chahal or BNN, but it seems the website has received a manual penalty for spamming.
