The United Nations’ International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has urged companies to adopt advanced tools to detect and eliminate misinformation and deepfake content, highlighting the growing threats these pose to elections and financial security. The call was made in a report released on Friday during the ITU’s “AI for Good Summit” in Geneva.
Deepfakes—AI-generated images, videos, and audio that convincingly mimic real people—are increasingly used to spread false information, the ITU warned. To tackle this, the report recommended robust standards for combating manipulated multimedia and urged platforms like social media sites to implement digital verification tools to authenticate content before sharing.
Bilel Jamoussi, head of the ITU’s Standardization Bureau’s Study Groups Department, noted that public trust in social media has dropped sharply because users struggle to distinguish truth from fake. Generative AI’s ability to fabricate realistic multimedia makes combating deepfakes a particularly pressing challenge.
Leonard Rosenthol from Adobe, a leading digital editing software company addressing deepfakes since 2019, emphasized the need for content provenance—information about the origin of digital media—to help users judge trustworthiness. “When scrolling feeds, users want to know: ‘Can I trust this image or video?’” he said.
Dr. Farzaneh Badiei, founder of Digital Medusa, a digital governance research firm, stressed the need for a coordinated global response, noting the lack of a single international body focused on detecting manipulated media. She warned that fragmented standards could make harmful deepfakes more effective.
The ITU is developing standards for watermarking videos—which constitute 80% of internet traffic—to embed provenance data such as creator identity and timestamps.
Tomaz Levak, founder of Swiss firm Umanitek, called on the private sector to proactively adopt safety measures and educate users. “AI will become more powerful and faster… We must upskill people to avoid them becoming victims,” he said.