Beyond Deepfakes: The Five Alarming Truths Reshaping Your Digital World
Global Information Warfare, Disinformation, and Regulation in 2025
This blog is written as part of a Lab Activity Task conducted during the Hackathon on 31 December 2025 under the Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University (MKBU). The topic “Misinformation and Disinformation” was assigned by the Head of the Department, Prof. and Dr. Dilip Barad Sir, to help students understand the growing challenges of false and misleading information in the digital age. In today’s world, news and content spread rapidly through social media and online platforms, often without verification, which can influence public opinion and create confusion. This blog explores the meaning, forms, and effects of misinformation and disinformation, while highlighting the importance of critical thinking, media awareness, and responsible information sharing.
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Beyond Deepfakes: The Five Alarming Truths Reshaping Your Digital World
Introduction: Navigating the Fog of Information
If you feel overwhelmed and confused by the modern information environment, you are not alone. Distinguishing fact from fiction online feels increasingly difficult, a daily battle against a flood of conflicting narratives, manipulated media, and sophisticated spin. The digital world, once promised as a gateway to knowledge, can often feel like a hall of mirrors.
This article is designed to cut through that noise. It reveals five of the most surprising, counter-intuitive, and genuinely impactful truths about our digital world as we move through 2025. Based on recent expert analysis from institutions like the Reuters Institute, the Alan Turing Institute, and Full Fact, these takeaways challenge common assumptions about misinformation, AI, and the platforms that shape our reality.
By understanding these shifts, you will gain a clearer, more nuanced perspective on the forces shaping what you see, believe, and share online. These aren't just abstract trends; they are the new rules of the road for navigating our complex digital lives.
1. The Great Retreat: Big Tech Is Quietly Quitting the Misinformation Fight
Major social media platforms, once vocal champions in the war against false narratives, are now quietly dismantling the very programs designed to fight it. This isn't a strategic pivot; it's a full-scale retreat from responsibility, leaving users more exposed than they have been in years.
The most glaring example is Meta's decision to end its Third-Party Fact-Checking (TPFC) program in the United States in January 2025. According to its own Oversight Board, the policy change was "announced hastily, in a departure from regular procedure." The move, part of a broader industry shift away from professional, independent fact-checking toward less robust, crowd-sourced models, occurred shortly after the certification of a new US presidential administration. At the time, Meta also claimed that the EU was "institutionalising censorship," signaling a significant change in its approach to content governance.
This pullback from professional oversight creates a dangerous vacuum. As Khaled Mansour, a writer who serves on Meta's independent Oversight Board, states:
Misinformation, disinformation and hate speech—including dehumanisation—can very much kill as we have seen in Rwanda, Myanmar and now in Syria. Fact checking is not a panacea against disinformation. It must be coupled with internal algorithms that are effective at scale, while public interest organisations work more intensively on equipping users from an early age to consume information critically.
This retreat from content moderation isn't happening in a vacuum; it coincides with a radical reshaping of the platforms themselves, turning once-diverse public squares into ideologically-driven territories.
2. The 2024 Election Wasn't a Deepfake Nightmare—It Was an Old-School Spin Zone
Contrary to widespread fears, the 2024 UK general election was not defined by a wave of sophisticated AI deepfakes meant to deceive voters. Instead, the campaign was dominated by something far more familiar: "traditional political spin" and the weaponization of misleading statistics by major political parties.
A report from Full Fact identified two key examples that saturated the debate:
• The Conservative claim that Labour's plan would mean "£2,000 higher taxes for every working family."
• The Labour claim that the Conservatives' plan would mean "£4,800 more on your mortgage."
Both figures were found by fact-checkers to be unreliable and based on a series of uncertain assumptions, yet they were repeated relentlessly. While the deepfake apocalypse didn't arrive, analysis from the Alan Turing Institute highlights the "second-order damage" caused by their mere existence. The possibility of AI fakes pollutes the entire information ecosystem, eroding general trust. This directly fuels what former UK Lord Chancellor Sir Robert Buckland calls the "liar's dividend," a dystopian reality "where no-one believes anything from any source, however reputable." The second-order damage of AI creates the perfect environment for this dividend to flourish, making it easier for bad actors to dismiss legitimate evidence as just another fake.
As Sam Stockwell of the Alan Turing Institute notes, our perception of new technology is often skewed:
However, we also often tend to “overestimate the change technology brings in the short term and underestimate its long-term effects.”
This is a crucial distinction. The most immediate threat to democratic discourse wasn't a futuristic AI weapon, but the persistent use of old-school deceptive tactics that systematically damage public trust.
3. X (Formerly Twitter) Didn't Collapse. It Just Became a Different Country.
Despite a "widespread X-odus by liberals and journalists" following Elon Musk's takeover, the platform has surprisingly not lost its overall reach for news, according to the 2025 Reuters Institute report. However, beneath that stable surface, a radical political transformation has occurred.
The platform's audience has fundamentally changed. In the United States, the proportion of the audience that self-identifies on the right has tripled since Musk took over. This is because, as the Reuters report notes, "The billionaire [Musk] has courted and platformed conservative and right-wing commentators while using his own account to boost Donald Trump and champion ‘free speech’ causes." This trend is not isolated; in the United Kingdom, the right-leaning audience has almost doubled while the progressive audience has been cut in half.
News media experts note the critical implication of this realignment: journalism is at risk of "ceding important ground to content creators and influencers peddling opinions not based in evidence." X remains a highly influential platform, but it has now become a new territory with a distinct political landscape, forcing journalists and researchers to grapple with whether to engage in hostile territory or cede it entirely to evidence-free influence.
4. Foreign Disinformation Got Smarter, Smaller, and Closer to Home
The strategy of foreign information warfare has evolved significantly. The era of relying on obvious state-sponsored media outlets like RT or Sputnik is giving way to a more subtle and insidious approach: a decentralized network of local, pro-Russian resources.
These outlets act as "translator-adapters," taking raw propaganda and repackaging it in local languages like Polish, German, or French. This tactic allows the content to bypass EU bans and appear far more trustworthy because it seems to originate from a domestic source. The strategy "exploits a core vulnerability of democracies: the high level of trust citizens place in domestic sources."
This sophisticated operation is amplified by new technological tactics. Russia is now "spoon-feeding" its prohibited content directly to AI models, creating a "self-sustaining disinformation machine." Technology has made translation "nearly costless," and the journey for a piece of propaganda from "Moscow to an adapted post in Warsaw or Berlin now takes only minutes." This AI-powered network, with the encrypted app Telegram serving as its primary "backdoor" into the EU, makes disinformation harder to detect and far more corrosive as it wears the disguise of a familiar, local voice.
5. The Most Common Deepfake Isn't a Politician—It's a Weapon Against Women
The single greatest use of deepfake technology today isn't to sway an election—it's to wage a war on women. An astonishing 98% of all deepfake videos online are non-consensual pornography, and 99% of the targets are female. This data reframes deepfake technology not as a political tool, but as a primary medium for "tech-facilitated gender-based violence."
This isn't a hypothetical threat; it is a weapon being actively deployed to harass, discredit, and silence women. For example, Rana Ayyub, an investigative journalist in India, was targeted with a viral deepfake porn video after she spoke out against a political party. The attack led to death threats and forced her to temporarily stop reporting.
This takeaway is critical. While we debate the potential for deepfakes to sway an election, the technology is already having "serious ramifications for who is able to participate in public life."
Conclusion: Rebuilding Reality in a Post-Truth World
The threads connecting these five truths paint a picture of an information landscape evolving in complex and often alarming ways. From tech platforms abandoning their posts as content guardians to foreign actors mastering the art of digital camouflage, the challenges are multiplying. The fight for truth is not a single battle but a multifaceted struggle against a spectrum of threats—some brand new, others as old as politics itself.
This is more than just a problem of "fake news"; it is a systemic challenge to our collective ability to agree on a shared reality. The very foundations of public trust are being eroded by spin, computational propaganda, and the targeted harassment of critical voices.
In a world where digital architects are abandoning their blueprints for reality, the question is no longer just what to trust, but how we must build the critical skills to verify it for ourselves.
Works Cited
Buckland, Sir Robert. Evidence and Trust in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. House of Lords, UK Parliament, 2024.
Full Fact. General Election 2024: False and Misleading Claims Explained. Full Fact, 2024,
www.fullfact.org/election-2024/.
Khaled Mansour. “Why Fact-Checking Still Matters.” Meta Oversight Board Commentary, Meta, 2025,
www.oversightboard.com.
Knight First Amendment Institute. “Don’t Panic Yet: Assessing the Evidence and Discourse Around Generative AI and Elections.” Columbia University, 2024,
knightcolumbia.org/content/dont-panic-yet-assessing-the-evidence-and-discourse-around-generative-ai-and-elections.
Meta Platforms Inc. “More Speech, Fewer Mistakes: Updating Our Approach to Content Moderation.” Meta Newsroom, Jan. 2025,
about.fb.com/news/2025/01/meta-more-speech-fewer-mistakes/.
Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Digital News Report 2025. University of Oxford, 2025,
www.reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-report/2025.
Stockwell, Sam, et al. Artificial Intelligence and the Integrity of Elections. Alan Turing Institute, 2024,
www.turing.ac.uk/research/publications/artificial-intelligence-and-elections.
Turing Institute, Alan. “The ‘Liar’s Dividend’: How AI Undermines Trust.” Alan Turing Institute Blog, 2024,
www.turing.ac.uk/blog/liars-dividend.
Deepstrike. “Deepfake Statistics 2025: Prevalence, Pornography, and Gendered Harm.” Deepstrike Research Blog, 2025,
deepstrike.io/blog/deepfake-statistics-2025.
Associated Press. “Deepfake Porn Spurs New Laws to Protect Victims.” AP News, 2025,
apnews.com/article/741a6e525e81e5e3d8843aac20de8615.
Ayyub, Rana. “When Deepfakes Are Used to Silence Women Journalists.” The Washington Post, 2023,
www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/20/deepfake-harassment-women-journalists/.
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