Disinformation watchdog NewsGuard said seven manipulated images together drew more than 21 million views on Elon Musk-owned platform X alone.
Using AI-generated or altered images, social media users have attempted to falsely connect prominent US politicians, including New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, with the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, researchers said Tuesday.
NewsGuard reported that seven such images collectively amassed over 21 million views on X, highlighting how technology-driven false narratives on social media are increasingly blurring the line between reality and fabrication.
Last week, the Justice Department released the latest batch of so-called Epstein files, consisting of more than three million documents, photos, and videos tied to its investigation into Epstein, who died in custody in 2019 in what was ruled a suicide.
The Epstein case has implicated several high-profile figures worldwide, including Britain’s former Prince Andrew, American intellectual Noam Chomsky, and Norway’s Crown Princess Mette-Marit.
Mamdani and former Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley are not among those named.
Despite this, conservative social media users circulated three images that allegedly showed Epstein posing with Mamdani, who appears as a child in the images. Two of the images also include Mira Nair, the mayor’s mother and an award-winning filmmaker.
NewsGuard said the images were AI-generated fabrications.
The watchdog cited an analysis using Google’s artificial intelligence tool Gemini, which detected a SynthID, an invisible watermark designed to identify AI-created content.
In a post on X that received more than 1.5 million views, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones shared one of the images and claimed that Musk’s AI chatbot Grok had identified it as real.
Disinformation researchers have long warned about the unreliability of AI chatbots as tools for fact-checking.
Also circulating online was a screenshot of an email allegedly sent by Haley, a former South Carolina governor and US ambassador to the United Nations, to Epstein.
“I have 2 babies with me. Can you arrange a flight for me? Can’t leave them at home,” the screenshot quoted Haley as writing.
However, a search of the alleged email in the Justice Department’s files produced no results.
The screenshot also showed other signs of fabrication, including the date of the supposed email. January 7, 2014, fell on a Tuesday, not a Saturday as indicated.
Haley did not immediately respond to AFP’s request for comment.
In a post on X last July, she urged then-President Donald Trump’s administration to release the Epstein files, saying, “let the chips fall where they may.”
Separately, Latin American social media users shared an image said to show Epstein sitting next to Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado at the Hampton Classic Horse Show in the United States in 2002.
Through a reverse-image search, NewsGuard found the image to be a digitally altered version of a photograph showing Epstein with a billionaire American businessman.
Online misinformation has previously attempted to link other prominent politicians to the Epstein scandal.
Last year, as Mark Carney emerged as a candidate for the leadership of Canada’s Liberal Party, social media images purported to show him with Epstein and his longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell.
AFP fact-checkers reported that those images displayed strong signs of being AI-generated.
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