Governments Are Using AI to Spread Misinformation, and the Public Is Starting to Treat That as a Given

A Bluesky post this week put it flatly: governments are using AI to spread misinformation, and people retreat into their silos and accept it on face value. The post got a single like and no replies. That's not a sign the claim was ignored — it's a sign it wasn't surprising enough to argue about.

The thing that's quietly changed in how people talk about AI and misinformation is the grammar of the threat. A year ago, the dominant sentence structure was conditional: AI *could* enable propaganda at scale, troll farms *might* be replaced by generative models, deepfakes *would eventually* destabilize elections. One of the more cogent posts circulating this week made exactly this observation in past tense — "I *used to think* the killer app for AI is misinformation," the writer began, before arguing that the more insidious long-term damage is actually the erosion of expertise itself. The misinformation threat, in other words, has been so thoroughly absorbed that it no longer feels like a warning. It feels like a done deal. The real fear is now one layer deeper.

That shift in register matters because it changes who gets talked about as the threat. Early AI misinformation panic centered on the usual suspects — Russian troll farms, election interference, scammers using synthetic voices. Those actors are still present in the conversation: AI-generated footage faking missile strikes on the USS Abraham Lincoln, a Liverpool professor's face appearing in fourteen TikTok videos promoting menopause supplements he knew nothing about, deepfake blackmail spreading through Telegram. But increasingly, posts name governments as principal actors, not edge cases. When the institution charged with protecting you is also listed as a potential source of the fake, the detection tools being demoed on Bluesky — "my phone has deepfake detection," someone noted with light sarcasm — start to feel beside the point.

The people most harmed by this gap aren't being adequately addressed in the conversation either. A Bluesky post about women facing graphic deepfake abuse with no legal recourse noted that the law is decades behind the technology, and that platforms have structured their terms of service to ensure someone else is always responsible. That post, like most of the ones circulating this week, got almost no engagement — not because the community disagreed, but because nothing about it was news anymore. The conversation about AI and misinformation has reached a strange plateau where the harms are well documented, the systemic failures are understood, and the outrage has nowhere useful to go. That's not resignation, exactly. It's closer to the exhaustion of being right about something for too long.