Social Security Debunks Rumors of Imminent $600 Benefit Boost

Phony online reports that Social Security recipients are getting a $600 cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) in June have prompted a raft of calls to the agency’s national telephone help line and a very public response from the Social Security Administration (SSA).

“SSA 800 # was slammed on June 3. Over 463,000 calls — 140k more calls than a few days earlier,” SSA Commissioner Martin O’Malley posted June 12 on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. “Why? In part because of a bogus news story about a $600 payment increase. This is FALSE: No COLA until January 2025.”

Social Security also placed an alert about the false reports as a banner atop pages on its website, and the SSA’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) issued a warning.

Circulated by ‘content farms’

The stories appear to have started circulating in late May, popping up on some of the same purported news and information sites that have also promoted bogus reports that Social Security beneficiaries were about to receive additional stimulus checks.

These so-called “content farms” often traffic in dubious stories on topics that garner widespread public attention, such as celebrity news or changes in Social Security or other benefit payments, according to McKenzie Sadeghi, an editor with the media watchdog group NewsGuard. The aim is to rank high in online search results, drawing users to pages saturated in revenue-generating advertisements.

Such sites often rely on content generated by artificial intelligence (AI), says Sadeghi, a former USA Today reporter whose work at NewsGuard focuses on AI and foreign influences in U.S. news media. She says the sites she has seen promoting the $600 COLA hoax are not among the more than 950 NewsGuard has identified to date as relying largely on AI-generated content with little or no human oversight.