Deepfakes, Real Wars: Synthetic Media and the Next Propaganda Order

From the first forged radio broadcasts of the twentieth century to today's hyper-realistic deepfakes, the struggle over what counts as evidence has always shaped war and politics. Deepfakes, Real Wars shows how cheap, accessible synthetic media tools have tipped that struggle into a new phase, where doubt itself becomes a weapon. Rather than treating each viral video as an isolated scandal, Farah Qudsi traces the emergence of a propaganda order built on engineered confusion, algorithmic amplification, and the deliberate erosion of shared facts.

Across case-driven chapters, the book explains how synthetic media interacts with platform design, crisis decision-making, and long-standing grievances. It dissects digital propaganda campaigns run by troll farms and state-linked operators, explores how crisis rumours hijack platform algorithms, and follows investigators as they use verification systems and open-source intelligence to reconstruct what really happened. Along the way, Qudsi shows who benefits when every uncomfortable image can be dismissed as a deepfake, and why democracies struggle to respond without undermining their own commitments to openness and debate.

Written for students, journalists, policy analysts, and engaged citizens, Deepfakes, Real Wars offers more than technical explanation. It provides a clear framework for understanding information warfare in which images, audio, and text can be fabricated at scale, yet publics must still choose how to mobilise, vote, and manage risk. Readers come away with a grounded sense of how public trust erosion unfolds, what forms of democratic resilience are realistically available, and how to live with contested media without retreating into either credulity or cynicism. This is not a book about panic; it is a guide to thinking clearly in an environment where seeing is no longer believing, but disbelief can also be weaponised.

Farah Qudsi writes at the intersection of political communication, technology, and conflict, with a particular interest in how societies construct truth under pressure. Her work draws on years of close observation of media systems, from traditional broadcasting to algorithmically curated feeds, and on engagement with practitioners who operate on the front lines of information crises. She approaches synthetic media not as a curiosity of machine learning, but as a lived problem for journalists, diplomats, and citizens.Growing up between different linguistic and political cultures, Qudsi learned early that the same event can carry sharply divergent meanings depending on who tells the story. A formative experience was following coverage of a distant war through both local and foreign outlets, noticing which images travelled and which disappeared. That sensitivity to framing, omission, and narrative power continues to shape her analysis.Qudsi's writing is characterised by intellectual clarity and ethical concern. She is sceptical of easy reassurances about technological fixes, attentive to the unequal burdens borne by vulnerable communities, and interested in how institutions earn or squander trust over time. In this book, she aims to give readers tools to think more critically about synthetic media without succumbing to fatalism. Her perspective draws on ongoing conversations with researchers, journalists, and civic actors working to chart a more resilient information landscape.