16 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY MARCH 19-25, 2026 www.montereycountynow.com Disinfo Wars ‘AI disinformation’ creates a virtual battlefront while real war rages in the Middle East. By The Arab Weekly FORUM President Donald Trump has accused Iran of using artificial intelligence as a “disinformation weapon” to misrepresent its wartime successes. “AI can be very dangerous, we have to be very careful with it,” Trump said on March 15, shortly after he posted on Truth Social accusing Western media outlets without evidence of “close coordination” with Iran to spread AI-generated “fake news.” The comments come amid renewed tensions between the Federal Communications Commission and broadcasters after Trump took aim at media coverage of the U.S. and Israel’s war with Iran (see “Free Speech,” p. 4). Meanwhile, AI-created videos circulating on X depict American soldiers captured by Iran, an Israeli city in ruins and U.S. embassies ablaze, a surge of lifelike deepfakes despite a policy crackdown to curb wartime disinformation. The Middle East war has unleashed an avalanche of AI-generated visuals, dwarfing anything seen in previous conflicts. In a bid to protect “authentic information” during conflicts, X announced it would suspend creators from its revenue-sharing program for 90 days if they post AI-generated war videos without disclosing they were artificially made. Subsequent violations will result in permanent suspension. The new policy is a notable pivot for a platform heavily criticized for becoming a haven of disinformation since Elon Musk completed his $44 billion acquisition of the site in 2022. But disinformation researchers remain skeptical. “The feeds I monitor are still flooded with AI-generated content about the war,” Joe Bodnar of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue says. “It doesn’t seem like creators have been dissuaded from pushing misleading AI-generated images and videos about the conflict.” Fact-checkers have identified a stream of AI fakes about the war, many from accounts with blue checkmarks that can be purchased. The flood of AI-fabricated visuals, mixed with authentic imagery from the Middle East, continues to grow faster than professional fact-checkers can debunk them. And Grok, X’s own AI chatbot, appeared to make the problem worse, wrongly telling users seeking fact-checks that numerous AI visuals from the war were real. Last month, a report from the Tech Transparency Project said 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 blue checkmarks for some of them.) Even if X’s demonetization policy were strictly enforced, a vast number of users peddling AI content are not part of the revenue-sharing program. Those users are still subject to being fact-checked through Community Notes but last year, a study by the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas found that more than 90 percent of X’s Community Notes are never published. This story was originally published in The Arab Weekly. OPINION The war has unleashed an avalanche of AI-generated visuals.
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