AI War Deepfakes Flood X Despite Demonetisation Policy
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- X announced last week it would suspend creators from its revenue sharing program for 90 days for posting undisclosed AI war videos, with permanent suspension for repeat violations, per head of product Nikita Bier.
- AI-generated deepfakes on X depict captured American soldiers beside Iranian flags, a tearful soldier inside a bombed-out embassy, an Israeli city in ruins, a destroyed U.S. navy fleet, and Dubai's Burj Khalifa engulfed in flames — a surge researchers say eclipses anything seen in previous conflicts.
- Joe Bodnar of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue told AFP the feeds he monitors remain flooded, pointing to a blue check account's AI clip of an Iranian 'nuclear-capable' strike on Israel that garnered more views than Bier's policy announcement.
- Grok, X's own AI chatbot, made the problem worse by wrongly telling users seeking fact-checks that numerous AI war visuals were real.
- A Tech Transparency Project report found X appeared to be profiting from more than two dozen premium accounts belonging to Iranian government officials and state-controlled news outlets pushing propaganda, potentially in violation of U.S. sanctions; X subsequently removed some blue checkmarks.
- A Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas study found more than 90% of X's Community Notes are never published, and Alexios Mantzarlis of Cornell Tech warned that AI metadata can be stripped and notes are 'relatively rare,' making high precision and high recall unlikely.
Why it matters: The policy targets the financial incentive, but X's engagement-based revenue model continues to reward sensational AI content, its own Grok chatbot validates fakes as real during fact-checks, and over 90% of Community Notes never publish — meaning the platform's verification infrastructure structurally cannot keep up with the volume of wartime AI disinformation, even if demonetisation is strictly enforced.
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