143: AI Propaganda
From Paintings to Platforms
Hallo Amsterdam!
My name is Marcus. i am ony my way to room F1.01B at the Faculteit der Geesteswetenschappen at the Digital Methods Summer School 2025 monitoring German far-right extremists livestreaming on TikTok.
📟 The AI propaganda revolution
🫡 TikTok Livestreams
🪱 Malicious Earworms
📟 The AI propaganda revolution
I introduced the term synthetic propaganda in May (#142) to better understand and unwrap “deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions and influence through GenAI-generated content.” Things have further escalated since i started documenting use cases by Donald Trump. He for instance reshared an AI-generated video of himself playing “Don’t Stop Believin’” by Journey (Source) and posted an image of himself and alligators wearing ICE-caps (Source) just days after Homeland Security had posted the alligators in an attempt to memefy monstrosities on X (Source).
As digital spaces are becoming battlefronts for geopolitical influence (The Conversation) the Iran-Israel war (13 June 2025 – 24 June 2025) led to an array of AI war spam with both conflict parties engaging in an AI slop fight: “AI slop is not the sole domain of anonymous amateur and professional propagandists any longer. The leaders of both Iran and Israel are doing it too. The Supreme Leader of Iran is posting AI-generated missile launches on his X account, a match for similar grotesques on the account of Israel’s Minister of Defense.” (404 media)
As new tools like Google’s Veo 3 make AI-generated videos more realistic than ever, they are seemingly being used to generate videos depicting racist and antisemitic tropes. Media Matters has identified “racist AI-generated content that is explicitly anti-Black, using images of monkeys to promote stereotypes about Black people”. Other racial and ethnic groups were targeted as well. In german context i have been following the #nogaboga-meme (1963 posts) that cloaks anti-Black sentiments in supposedly “funny” content. Can you help me to fully understand the meme?
📆 I am currently gathering data for a paper on synthetic propaganda that i will present at the Annual Conference of the German Society for Media Studies in September.
🫡 TikTok Livestreams
Approximately 130 million creators around the world go live on TikTok each day, reaching billions of viewers (TikTok). Among the streamers are far-right activists, nazi rappers and politicians tying bonds, promoting hate and spreading propaganda. Yet this space has remained largely unresearched due to its ephemeral content, the constant notion of in- and out-groups, missing tools and methods.
Therefore i was super excited to join a team of international researchers in a data sprint during the Digital Methods Summer School at the University of Amsterdam. Thx so much for reaching out Esther Hammelburg. We are currently monitoring more than a hundred German right wing extremists, immersing ourselves in their communication strategies, unwrapping topics, tactics, codes and connections.
👾 Our data relies on an automated monitoring system built by Pieter van Boheemen (Github). If you want to discuss first findings, just drop me a line.
🪱 Malicious Earworms
Together with Marloes Geboers (Google Scholar) i have published a pre-print of a 📘 book chapter on “Malicious earworms and useful memes, how the far-right surfs on TikTok audio trends” (arXiv). It is part of the book “Content Moderation across Social Media Platforms”, edited by Richard Rogers (Google Scholar).
Building up on previous work like the sound of disinformation together with Tom Divon (Google Scholar) we explore the networked linkages between an AfD campaign and extremist rightwing niches on TikTok, ‘held together’ and networked through sounds that hijack popular songs or songs that are blatantly problematic in their contents but that latch onto meme templates to attain visibility.
We presented our results in a keynote for this year’s Digital Methods Summer School at the University of Amsterdam, including lots of audio examples ranging from generative AI techno bangers promoting the AfD, to banned extremist synth pop from the early 1990s to JumpStyle Mashups featuring Sponge Bob.
📆 We will present further sounds at the “Sounds of Fascism: Media, Practices, Imagination” conference at the University Bonn in September.
Tagesschau TikTok
The Tagesschau is probably the most prestigious news service in Germany. It has a pretty solid TikTok account (1.9M Followers 72.4MLikes). I was happy to join a video as TikTok-researcher discussing political communication and the performance of Germany’s new chancellor Friedrich Merz on the platform (“Not that bad, actually”). The video has currently 2.4 M views 🤯.
What else?
TikTok’s research API is broken (AI Forensics). This again leads to a great data standoff. It is researchers vs. platforms (Goanta et al.). While APIs are closing, we are witnessing a new AI (research) rising.
The Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2025 is out. It has 171 pages. TikTok is mentioned 143 times. In 2020 it was mentioned 3 times (#104). Here is the PDF.
Content moderators say they’re exposed to graphic violence, psychological trauma, and union-busting tactics, and now a larger movement is brewing. The people who clean up your TikTok feed are starting to fight back (Rest of World)
Thanks for reading. If you're interested in tailored insights, workshops, consulting, or policy support, feel free to get in touch — I'd be happy to collaborate.