AI-generated videos and false claims flood Facebook ahead of Bangladesh votepublished at 11:08 GMT

11:08 GMT

Shruti Menon
BBC Verify senior journalist, reporting from Dhaka

What’s interesting about this election is the amount of political content created using artificial intelligence flooding social media in Bangladesh.

I’ve been monitoring dozens of Facebook pages since January and have come across hundreds of AI-generated political videos, many of which are not labelled as synthetic content.

The clips feature hyper-realistic but fabricated news presenters, people who are supposedly “ordinary citizens” and others dressed in police-style uniforms. The production quality is often polished, making the videos appear real at first glance.

One video I’ve verified as AI-generated using SynthID, Google’s tool to detect when media has been made using its software, has been viewed nearly eight million times. It shows a man in a blue uniform resembling an official figure delivering a partisan political message.

An AI-generated image of a man wearing what appears to be a police uniform speaking at a media briefing, he is speaking and pointing at the camera with microphones on front of him at a desk

Another clip, viewed nearly 200,000 times, features a fake shopkeeper explaining why he would not vote for a particular candidate.

Under Bangladesh’s electoral code of conduct, creating or sharing misleading AI-generated content is prohibited. However, there is limited clarity on how this is being monitored or enforced online.