Adam Zivo: The deepfake war on Tel Aviv |
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Adam Zivo: The deepfake war on Tel Aviv
Iran's Islamic regime and its supporters are flooding social media with AI-videos showing the Israeli city's destruction
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TEL AVIV — Having failed to achieve substantial wartime victories, Iran’s Islamic regime and its supporters are now flooding social media with AI-generated videos falsely claiming that Tel Aviv has been destroyed. This descent into self-delusion may be pathetic, but it epitomizes an evolution in information warfare that the world is ill-equipped to handle.
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These AI videos predominantly claim to show the city being struck by large barrages of ballistic missiles, and are often deployed in tandem with more traditional forms of disinformation, such as footage of old strikes — or other conflict zones — that is misrepresented as contemporary Israeli suffering.
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This content is being used to push conspiratorial claims that the situation in Israel is far worse than publicly reported, in what appears to be a coordinated campaign to demoralize the West and undermine support for further strikes against the Islamic regime. These efforts appear to have been effective, to some degree, as these videos have collectively been posted thousands of times and amassed hundreds of millions of views.
During last summer’s 12-Day War, the internet was also flooded with fake content claiming that Tel Aviv had been destroyed. Rapid advancements in AI video have made this new round of disinformation far more convincing, though, especially because it is now possible to simulate “shaky camera” cinematography and virtual “citizen reporters” that impart an aura of credibility.
This content is also much easier, and cheaper, to produce and publish than before.
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Worse yet, as many social media platforms pay users for posts that generate high engagement, some bad actors are spreading disinformation solely for profit. X has tried to address this by temporarily demonetizing accounts that post unlabelled AI-generated war content, but neither TikTok nor Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram) have implemented similar controls.
Major media outlets — including BBC, CNN, New York Times and The Guardian — have reported on the torrent of AI-generated disinformation and provided fact checking assistance where possible. Yet, in the face of so much fake content, their efforts have hardly made a dent in the information environment.
Left to their own devices, many social media users are relying on AI bots, such as Grok, to factcheck posts, without understanding that these bots cannot reliably determine authenticity and regularly give contradictory answers. So this only further muddles everything.
People who are currently in Tel Aviv — both residents and visitors — have tried to counter online disinformation by posting videos confirming that, notwithstanding some very limited damage, the city is perfectly fine. They have often used comedy to make this point: for example, Israeli influencer Eylon Levy has posted from the beaches of Tel Aviv joking that the Iranian regime pounded the city into sand.
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Israelis have also mocked the “Tel Aviv has been destroyed” narrative by producing their own AI videos showing the city being blown up by spaceships and dinosaurs, and have sardonically written that this is genuine footage that the government does not want the world to see.
I myself am currently in Tel Aviv on behalf of The News Forum, and have personally tried to combat disinformation by posting videos from the city. This has included professional dispatches along with more lighthearted content, such as people playing volleyball at the beach. The online response has been amusing and a little disturbing.
Many of the Islamic regime’s supporters simply cannot believe that Tel Aviv is doing fine. Having had their fantasies affirmed by AI slop, they have angrily decided that any contradictory information must be a fabrication. In a perverse inversion, they routinely claim that actual footage of Tel Aviv is AI-generated, or that mass destruction must be just off-camera, in a different district.
Another favourite narrative of theirs is that Israel is under a “media blackout” and that people must “smuggle” out footage of Tel Aviv’s destruction at the risk of imprisonment. These specious claims rely on misrepresentations of common sense restrictions on wartime reporting.
Local journalists have told me that if a missile hits a civilian area in Israel, you cannot publicly identify the exact impact location until at least a few hours have passed, as this information could be used by Iran to calibrate attacks and endanger first-responders at the site (identifying the general region is fine, though). Reporting on sensitive military installations is also off-limits for national security reasons, even if they are hit.
This is standard practice for war zones, including in Ukraine, and, outside of these reasonable limits, anything is free game for both journalists and regular Israelis. There are no restrictions on political speech, and no obligation to talk or post about the war in any particular way.
When Israelis say Tel Aviv is doing just fine, they mean it. When random westerners insist that there is asphyxiating censorship, it is like listening to a schizophrenic.
In general, being here these days is a little kafkaesque, because it means having people half a world away — whose brains have been melted by TikTok — lecture you about the realities of your immediate surroundings. Worse yet, most of them seem overjoyed by the thought of Tel Aviv being reduced to rubble, demonstrating a sadistic hunger for mass civilian casualties.
This kind of lunacy has always existed, but now that realistic AI disinformation is cheap and abundant, we can expect these dynamics to be turbocharged going forward, as peoples’ grasp on reality grows yet more tenuous.
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