Disinformation

AI-Generated Disinformation and the Trust Crisis

The disinformation challenge that occupied most of my attention until recently – the deliberate production and dissemination of false information by human actors – has been joined by a challenge that is qualitatively different and, in certain respects, more dangerous.

AI-generated disinformation – synthetic text, images, audio, and video produced by machine learning systems – changes the economics of deception in a way that undermines not just the accuracy of specific claims but the epistemic infrastructure on which journalism depends.

The Algorithm Is Not Your Editor

There is a question that every working journalist should ask at the start of every shift: who decided this was the story?

Not which editor approved it. Not which source tipped it. Who – or what – decided that this particular piece of information would reach the public, and that other pieces would not?

Increasingly, the answer is not a person. It is a recommendation engine.

The Invisible Editor

We have spent decades fighting overt censorship. State-controlled media, editorial interference by owners, legal threats designed to kill stories before publication – these are enemies we understand. We have names for them. We know how to resist.

The Fact-Check Is Not Enough

The fact-checking movement has accomplished something genuinely valuable: it has created an infrastructure for verifying individual claims made in public discourse. This is important work, and I do not diminish it.

But I am here to argue that it is not enough, and that the belief that it is enough is itself a problem.

The limitation of fact-checking is structural. Fact-checking operates at the level of individual claims: this statistic is accurate or inaccurate, this quote is real or fabricated, this event did or did not occur as described. What fact-checking cannot address is the narrative – the larger story within which individual facts are arranged to produce a meaning that the facts themselves do not support.

Fact-Checking as Resistance

Fact-checking is often presented as a neutral, technical practice. You verify a claim. You check the sources. You publish the result. Simple.

This is wrong. Fact-checking is not neutral. It never has been.

In an environment saturated with lies, stating a fact is a political act.

Let me show you why.

The Myth of Neutrality

Journalism schools teach fact-checking as if it were plumbing. A mechanical process. Find the claim. Locate the evidence. Match them up. Publish the verdict.