For most of human history, there was a simple, unspoken rule that held society together: seeing was believing. If you witnessed something with your own eyes—a face, a voice, an event—you trusted it. That trust was the bedrock of communities, of courts, of journalism, of everyday conversation. But in the twenty-first century, that ancient rule has been quietly broken. The same artificial intelligence and 5G technology that promised to connect every corner of the world and make the sum of human knowledge available in an instant has also unleashed a shadow that we are only beginning to understand. We now live in an age where a video can show a person saying something they never said, doing something they never did, and being somewhere they never were—and the video will look completely real. Rumors, which have existed since the first humans gathered around a fire, have evolved from whispers to weaponized, algorithm-boosted, AI-crafted lies that spread faster than the truth can ever catch up. This is not just a problem for politicians or celebrities. It is a problem that reaches into every home, every classroom, every office, and every election. Fake news and deepfakes are not simply annoying byproducts of the internet; they represent a fundamental threat to the very idea of truth, and to the trust that makes democracy, society, and human relationships possible. When we can no longer agree on what is real, the world becomes a much more dangerous and lonely place.
To be clear, lying and rumor-mongering are nothing new. Since the earliest tribal conflicts, falsehoods have been used as tools of war, propaganda, and personal destruction. But the nature and scale of the problem have changed so dramatically that we are dealing with an entirely different beast. In the past, a lie might take weeks to spread from one town to another, and there was usually someone who could verify the facts. Today, a fabricated video can circle the globe in seconds, crossing borders and languages before any fact-checker can even wake up. The most alarming development in this new landscape is deepfake technology—synthetic audio and video created by artificial intelligence, specifically through deep learning and something called Generative Adversarial Networks, or GANs. These systems learn to imitate a person’s face, voice, and mannerisms so accurately that even close friends and family members can be fooled. The most chilling part is that this is happening at scale. According to the Brookings Institution, the volume of AI-generated fake content online is roughly doubling every year. A global survey by Deeptrace, a cybersecurity firm that monitors such threats, found that deepfake videos are multiplying at an alarming rate, and that many of them are being used to destabilize political systems, smear opponents, and manipulate public opinion. This is no longer a niche concern of tech nerds or paranoid sci-fi fans. It is a measured, documented, and accelerating crisis that touches every country, and no one—no matter how sophisticated or educated—is fully immune to its effects.
This is not a distant problem happening somewhere else; it is happening right here in our own neighborhoods. Bangladesh, like many other nations, is feeling the sharp sting of this crisis. Our own fact-checking organizations—Rumor Scanner, Dismislab, BD FactCheck—report thousands of rumors and deepfake incidents every single year. These incidents target politicians, religious leaders, and ordinary private citizens with devastating precision. During past national elections, deepfake technology was used to create offensive, fabricated videos aimed specifically at discouraging women from participating in politics—a vicious attempt to silence voices that have fought for decades to be heard. In other cases, fake audio clips and doctored images centered around religious issues have inflamed tensions and triggered outbreaks of communal violence, leaving real communities torn apart and law and order seriously shaken. Think about what that means in human terms. A woman running for office, a neighborhood of a minority group, a businessman with a reputation to protect—all of them can be destroyed in a matter of hours by a video they never knew existed. The emotional violence is deeply personal, but the social damage is collective. When lies are allowed to dictate how we see our neighbors, our opponents, and our leaders, the entire fabric of trust that holds Bangladesh together begins to fray. We have seen the aftermath: mobs gathered in anger, innocent people attacked, families forced to flee their homes—all because of something someone watched on a phone and did not think to question.
Why do these fake stories spread with such terrifying speed and power? The truth is uncomfortable: the problem is not only technological, it is deeply, painfully human. As a famous study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology revealed, fake news spreads six times faster than real news and is seventy percent more likely to be shared. That is not a flaw in the algorithms alone; it is a reflection of our own nature. Psychological research points to a well-known phenomenon called confirmation bias—the tendency we all have to believe information that matches what we already think and feel, and to dismiss anything that challenges it. When you see a video of a politician you have always disliked saying something outrageous, your brain does not stop to wonder, “Did this really happen?” It whispers to you, “I knew this all along.” The emotion feels like truth, and so you share it, nudging it along to a thousand other people who will also feel that rush of vindication. This is not stupidity; it is a deeply human weakness, an instinct that once kept us safe by helping us trust our tribe and distrust outsiders. But in the digital age, that instinct is being exploited by people who understand it perfectly and use it ruthlessly. They know that a lie wrapped in emotion will always outperform a nuanced, dry fact. They know that fear and anger are addictive, and they have built entire industries around feeding those addictions. Until we recognize our own vulnerability, no amount of algorithm tinkering or platform moderation will solve the crisis.
The real-world damage of this perfect storm is difficult to overstate. Consider the fragility of democracy itself. Democracy depends on the ability of citizens to make informed choices, but a fabricated confession or a scandalous video released just days before an election can shift public opinion overnight. Even after the lie is exposed and the video is debunked, the doubt it plants does not easily die. It sows suspicion not only in a particular candidate but in the entire democratic system—people begin to assume that everything is manipulated, that voting is pointless, that nothing is real. Then there is the devastating issue of violence against women. around ninety-six percent of all deepfake misuse globally involves non-consensual explicit content targeting women. Let that number sink in. This technology is being used for cyberbullying, blackmail, sexual harassment, and psychological torture, stripping women of their dignity, safety, and peace of mind in ways that leave no bruises but deep scars. And beyond these direct harms, there is something researchers call the “liar’s dividend.” As people become aware that audio and video can be convincingly faked, they become skeptical of everything—including genuinely true and verified reporting. Real criminals and corrupt officials can point at authentic evidence of their misconduct and simply claim it is a deepfake, sowing enough doubt to avoid accountability. In this way, the mere existence of the technology erodes the media’s credibility, creating an environment where nobody knows what to believe, and where the truth becomes just another opinion. This erosion of shared reality is perhaps the greatest loss of all, because without a common understanding of facts, we cannot have productive conversations, compromise, justice, or peace.
None of this is inevitable. We are not helpless victims of our own creativity, and we have the capacity to fight back—but only if we understand that this is a shared responsibility. First, we need technological safeguards: governments and international bodies must push major tech companies like Meta, Google, and OpenAI to adopt robust watermarking and metadata systems that automatically flag AI-generated content the moment it is uploaded. This will not catch everything, but it will build a foundation of transparency. Second, our legal frameworks must evolve. Bangladesh’s cyber security laws urgently need to be updated to specifically address deepfake fraud and digital character assassination, with clear, strict penalties that will actually discourage offenders. Third, mainstream media outlets must embrace a culture of accuracy over speed, maintaining dedicated fact-checking and deepfake-detection teams, and refusing to publish stories until they have been verified—even if that means losing the race for the headline. And finally, and perhaps most importantly, we must invest in digital literacy. From primary school onward, children and adults alike should be taught how to critically evaluate information, how to spot deepfakes, how to verify sources, and how to pause before sharing that emotionally charged video. But beneath all these policies, we need something even more fundamental: we need to reconnect with the value of truth as a human virtue. Protecting the truth is not just about law and order or political stability; it is about our shared well-being, our safety, and our ability to live together as a society. When we accept a lie because it comforts us, or share it because it validates us, we are not just harming the person at the center of the lie—we are harming ourselves. We are digging the grave of our own collective trust. The age of deepfakes and rumors is a test of our character, a test of our discipline, and a test of our compassion. We cannot afford to fail it. We must choose truth, even when it is inconvenient, even when it is difficult, and even when it does not flatter us. Because in the end, truth is not just a matter of fact—it is the fragile thread that connects us all, and once it is cut, we will all be lost in a fog of lies. It is time to hold on to it tightly, before it slips away forever.