16/03/2026

MONDAY | MAR 16, 2026

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AI fakes about war swirl on X WASHINGTON: AI-created videos circulating on Elon Musk’s X depict American soldiers captured by Iran, an Israeli city in ruins, and US embassies ablaze – a surge of lifelike deepfakes despite a policy crackdown to curb wartime disinformation. It also won praise from senior State Department official Sarah Rogers, who called it a “great complement” to X’s Community Notes, a crowd-sourced verification system, that results in “less reach (thus monetisation)” for inaccurate content. But disinformation researchers remain sceptical. premium accounts with blue checkmarks that can be purchased. They include AI videos depicting a tearful American soldier inside a bombed-out embassy, captured US troops on their knees beside Iranian flags, and a destroyed US navy fleet. 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. o Researchers sceptical of policy crackdown

TOKYO: A senior Japanese policy adviser said yesterday the threshold is “extremely high” for Tokyo to send its warships to help protect a shipping lane for oil in the Middle East, hours after US President Donald Trump’s call for other countries to do so. After earlier vowing that the US Navy would “very soon” begin escorting tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, Trump called for reinforcements on Saturday. “I regard the threshold as extremely high” for sending Japanese navy ships to the region under Japanese law, Takayuki Kobayashi, the policy chief of Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s Liberal Democratic Party, said yesterday on the public broadcaster NHK’s political debate programme. “Legally speaking, we do not rule out the possibility, but given the situation, I believe this is something that must be considered with great caution.” Sending its Self-Defence Forces abroad is politically sensitive in the officially pacifist Japan, as many voters support the US-imposed, war renouncing 1947 constitution. Last week, Takaichi said at a parliament session “nothing has been decided” over whether to send Japanese warships to the Middle East to escort tankers. Kobayashi said he would like to see Takaichi “ascertain what President Trump’s true intentions are”. He said he expected the leaders to discuss how Tokyo and Washington “can work together to ensure that there would be no vacuum in the security framework of East Asia” as US troops are reportedly being sent to the Gulf from their bases in Japan and South Korea. – AFP officials and state-controlled news outlets pushing propaganda, potentially in violation of US sanctions. X subsequently removed blue checkmarks for some of them, the report said. Even if X’s demonetisation policy were strictly enforced, a vast number of X users peddling AI content are not part of the revenue sharing programme, researchers say. Those users are still subject to being fact checked through Community Notes, a system whose effectiveness has been repeatedly questioned by researchers. Last year, a study by the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas found more than 90% of X’s Community Notes are never published, highlighting major limits. “X’s policy is a reasonable countermeasure to viral disinformation about the war. In principle, this policy reduces the incentive structure for those spreading disinformation,” said Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the Security, Trust, and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech. “The devil will be in the implementing detail: Metadata on AI content can be removed and Community Notes are relatively rare,” he said. “It is unlikely that X will be able to guarantee both high precision and high recall for this policy.”– AFP Japan not keen to deploy warships

The Middle East war has unleashed an avalanche of AI-generated visuals, dwarfing anything seen in previous conflicts and often leaving social media users unable to distinguish fabrication from reality, researchers say. In a bid to protect “authentic information” during conflicts, X announced last week that it would suspend creators from its revenue sharing programme for 90 days if they post AI-generated war videos without disclosing they were artificially made. Subsequent violations will result in permanent suspension, X’s head of product Nikita Bier warned in a post. The new policy is a notable pivot for a platform heavily criticised for becoming a haven of disinformation since Musk completed his US$44 billion (RM173 billion) acquisition of the site in October 2022.

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. Researchers have also warned that X’s mode, allowing premium accounts to earn payouts based on engagement, has turbocharged the financial incentive to peddle false or sensational content. One premium account, which posted an AI video of Dubai’s Burj Khalifa skyscraper engulfed in flames, ignored a request from Bier that it label the content as AI. The post remained online, racking up more than two million views. 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

“The feeds I monitor are still flooded with AI-generated content about the war,” said Joe Bodnar of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. “It doesn’t seem like creators have been dissuaded from pushing misleading AI-generated images and videos about the conflict.” Bodnar pointed to a post from a premier “blue check” X account, which is eligible for monetisation, that shared an AI clip depicting an Iranian “nuclear-capable” strike on Israel. The post garnered more views than Bier’s message about cracking down on AI content. X did not respond when AFP asked how many accounts it had demonetised since Bier’s announcement. AFP fact-checkers identified a stream of AI fakes about the Middle East war, many from X’s

CLEAN START ... Hindu devotees pray during the Melasti ceremony prayer at Kenjeran beach in Surabaya, Java, on Saturday. Melasti is a purification festival which is held several days before ‘Nyepi’, the day of silence, when Hindu devotees are not allowed to work, travel or take part in any indulgence. – AFPPIC

Three Iranian footballers choose to return home SYDNEY: Three members of the Iranian women’s football team who had sought asylum in Australia have decided to return to Iran, Australia’s government said yesterday. Four of the seven members have decided to leave Australia so far. Another member changed her mind last week.

three players will travel to Tehran in the coming days to once again be embraced by their families and homeland,” FFIRI said in a statement. The Iranian team’s campaign in the Asian Cup started just as the US and Israel launched airstrikes on Iran. They were eliminated from the tournament last Sunday. – Reuters

ensure that opportunities are provided and communicated, we cannot remove the context in which the players are making these incredibly difficult decisions.” The Iranian Football Association (FFIRI) named the players as Mona Hamoudi, Zahra Sarbali and Zahra Meshkehkar. “After arriving in Malaysia and joining the rest of Iran’s women’s national football team, the

“After telling Australian officials they had made this decision, the players were given repeated chances to talk about their options,” Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said in a statement. “While the Australian Government can

Australia granted visas to seven Iranian footballers last week after they sought asylum, saying they feared persecution if they returned home after they failed to sing the national anthem at a Women’s Asian Cup match.