M.15. War Narratives in the Age of Deepfakes: Social Media Literacies, OSINT Practices and Democratic Education

This panel focuses on how war narratives are produced, circulated and contested within a digital environment in which AI-generated content and platform logics play a central role in organising public communication. Our interest is not only in “information” about conflicts, but in the narrative and visual forms through which wars are told: storylines of aggression and defence, figures of victims and heroes, frames of legitimacy and revenge. Debates on information disorder (Wardle & Derakhshan, 2017) and on stati di connessione and connected publics in the social network society (Boccia Artieri, 2012) provide the conceptual background for analysing these war narratives as they travel across TikTok, X, Telegram and other platforms, and for asking how they configure perceptions of legitimacy, victimhood and responsibility, as well as how they challenge democratic education in an onlife context.
Particular attention is paid to synthetic media and deepfakes, increasingly employed in influence operations and information warfare. Recent Bellingcat investigations into AI-generated deepfake videos during the 2025 India–Pakistan crisis, and into staged or recycled conflict footage in the Russia–Ukraine war and the Israel–Gaza context, show how such artefacts can infiltrate mainstream coverage, rapidly shape public understandings of war and only later be contested through open-source verification. These artefacts do not simply “fake” reality, but intervene in the conditions of trust in images and in the epistemic authority of audiovisual evidence, with direct implications for citizens’ capacity to deliberate on war, security and human rights.