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The 2024 election cycle was described by analysts as "the most information-disordered election year in history." More than four billion people voted in national elections across the world. AI-generated disinformation — fake videos, fabricated quotes, synthetic news — was used as a political weapon in dozens of countries. Youth workers preparing young people for democratic participation must now understand this landscape.
What Deepfakes Are and How They Work
A deepfake is a video, audio recording, or image generated by artificial intelligence to depict something that did not happen. The technology uses deep learning — specifically generative adversarial networks — to create synthetic media that is increasingly indistinguishable from genuine recordings, even to trained observers.
Creating a convincing deepfake video of a public figure required specialist expertise and expensive equipment in 2020. In 2025, it can be done with a consumer laptop and free software in a few hours. The democratisation of this technology is genuinely alarming.
The Disinformation Ecosystem
Deepfakes do not operate in isolation. They are part of a broader disinformation ecosystem that includes: coordinated inauthentic behaviour (networks of fake accounts spreading false content), AI-generated text (synthetic news articles, fabricated academic citations, fake expert quotes), and algorithmic amplification (recommendation systems that reward engagement regardless of accuracy).
The goal of much political disinformation is not to convince people of specific falsehoods. It is to create a generalised sense that truth is impossible to determine — that everyone is lying, that all sources are equally unreliable. Epistemic paralysis is itself a political outcome.
Why Young People Are Vulnerable
Young people often have higher digital fluency than older generations but not necessarily higher media literacy. Fluency — the ability to use digital tools — is different from literacy — the ability to critically evaluate digital content. Research consistently shows that young people share misinformation at similar or higher rates than older cohorts, often because they process information quickly and share without verification.
What Youth Workers Can Do
Media literacy education in the era of AI disinformation requires updating some traditional approaches. Teaching young people to verify images by checking the source is not sufficient when AI can generate realistic images with no source. Trusting official institutions is harder when official channels are themselves vulnerable to compromise.
- Teach lateral reading: checking what other sources say about a source, rather than evaluating the source in isolation
- Practice emotional regulation: content designed to provoke anger or disgust is more likely to be disinformation — notice the feeling before you share
- Use verification tools: reverse image search, InVID/WeVerify for video verification, metadata analysis
- Develop source triangulation habits: does this claim appear in multiple independent, reliable sources?
- Understand AI tells: current deepfakes still have detectable features — hands, teeth, hair, background consistency — that careful observation can identify
The Democratic Stakes
Democracy depends on citizens being able to form genuine opinions based on something approximating reality. If disinformation makes that impossible — if the information environment becomes so polluted that people give up trying to evaluate it — democracy becomes a form without substance. Media literacy education is, in this sense, democracy education. Youth workers need to treat it with that seriousness.