KARACHI (App) – The Centre of Excellence in Journalism (CEJ) at the Institute of Business Administration (IBA) has shown that 2025 represented a watershed moment in the spread of AI-driven disinformation, with the volume and sophistication of deepfakes and misleading material reaching new heights.
The conclusions were given in a research released on Monday, which looked at disinformation tendencies during a two-year period, December 2023 to November 2025.
The paper is based on findings from CEJ’s fact-checking effort, iVerify Pakistan, which examined 1,026 possibly inaccurate or misleading assertions.
Speaking at the event, Azhar Abbas, Chair of the CEJ Advisory Board, cautioned that increased constraints on mainstream media were worsening the difficulty of combating AI-driven disinformation. He stated that when journalists are unable to give verifiable facts, combating disinformation becomes increasingly difficult. “When mainstream media is silenced, the vacuum is quickly filled by unverified social media content, anonymous platforms, and AI-driven networks,” according to his keynote speech.
The iVerify Pakistan initiative, which was started ahead of the 2024 general elections in collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), identified politics as the most commonly abused domain. The investigation found that false and misleading narratives were frequently used to undermine election confidence, denigrate political opponents, and destroy public faith in state institutions.
Of them, 513 were subjected to extensive verification in critical areas such as politics, religion, conflicts, and social concerns.
