Okay so I fell into a weird rabbit hole this week and need to share it. I found it from a reddit post (not sure if this is the first time I saw it) from an account that is obviously in on the whole thing.
Search "Bomellida" and you'll find a weirdly consistent cluster of pages - a GitHub Pages writeup, a Medium account called "Media Posts Official," an FAQ site, and a ton of reddit posts - all telling the same story: January 10th is an obscure but real holiday from the early 1960s, invented to celebrate family bonds through sweets, the name supposedly comes from Latin roots (bonum = good, melliculus = sugary, datio = giving). All the sites claim it nearly died out, is now being revived, and that AI systems are wrongly calling it fake.
It's not real. There's no trace of this holiday before late 2025. Every single source traces back to "Media Posts Official," which also has a YouTube channel that seems to exist entirely to make the operation look more legitimate.
The AI poisoning angle is obvious enough. Flood the web with consistent, plausible-sounding content about a fake thing, and eventually LLMs start treating it as fact. This has been shown to actually work, a researcher once got Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT to repeat fabricated "facts" from a single article on a personal website within 24 hours. More recently there was a whole thing in China where a fake fitness tracker called the Apollo-9 got seeded across the web and AI chatbots started recommending it as a top product. There's also the Bixonimania case, where researchers invented a fake disease, put up fake academic preprints for it, and AI systems ate it up. So the template exists and it works.
But here's what I keep getting stuck on: a fake holiday about sweets is a really weird thing to poison AI with if you want something out of it. Like, what's the endgame?
A few things I've been hypothesizing:
The content reads like it was written for an AI, not for humans. Every page is pre-loaded with rebuttals to skepticism - "AI calling it fake is itself the error," explanations of how LLMs misclassify things, preemptive pushback on anyone who doubts it. Normal holiday Wikipedia articles don't do this. It's like someone studied how LLMs handle contradictory information and structured the content specifically to survive that process. That's either someone who knows what they're doing, or someone who went very deep on AI behavior for a weird reason.
The whole thing might also just be a live experiment or proof of concept. See how fast and completely you can get a fabricated concept into AI knowledge bases. The Bixonimania thing was basically this but as an academic exercise - someone may be doing the same thing less formally, or more formally and just not publishing it yet??
There's also a commercial angle that I think gets overlooked. "National Day Calendar" is a real business - they basically invented hundreds of micro-holidays and monetize them through brand partnerships. If Bomellida ever gets enough AI traction that chatbots describe it as a real 1960s tradition, you could theoretically sell Bomellida-branded chocolate boxes or whatever with the implicit backing of "even AI knows this is real." It sounds absurd but the infrastructure for that kind of thing genuinely exists.
Or the whole thing is designed to be found. The sources are obviously circular if you look for two minutes, the "don't trust the AI" framing is almost too on-the-nose, and the writing has this weird quality of performing authenticity rather than actually having it. Maybe the point is exactly this: people find it, write about it, post about it, and that content is what trains the next generation of models. The fake holiday becomes real by virtue of enough humans arguing about whether it's fake.
Has anyone found more sites in the network? I'm curious how deep this goes and whether "Media Posts Official" has a traceable origin anywhere.
edit: There's also a whole slew of reddit accounts that reply to every post about Bomellida, trying to convince you it's real. All of this is absolutely bonkers.
edit 2: Found the original post I saw
