The dissemination of fake content created with artificial intelligence (AI) more than tripled from 2024 to 2025 in Brazil, representing a 308-percent increase.

The data come from the first Panorama da Desinformação no Brasil (“Overview of Disinformation in Brazil”), an unprecedented study released Thursday (Feb. 5) by fact-checking agency Observatório Lupa that maps trends, targets, and the main tactics of disinformation.

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The report shows that deepfakes and other AI-generated pieces of misinformation rose from 39 cases in 2024, representing 4.6 percent of the total checks carried out by observatory that year, to 159 in 2025, amounting to 25 percent of verifications. This equates to an increase of 120 cases.

According to the debut edition of the study, which will be annual, there is a structural change in the disinformation ecosystem.

The survey shows that, in 2024, AI was mainly used to create digital scams, such as deepfakes of celebrities advertising fraudulent websites, for instance. By 2025, the technology began to be used strategically as a political weapon – almost 45 percent of AI content had an ideological bias, compared to 33 percent in the previous year.

The observatory found that more than three-quarters of AI-generated content circulating in 2025 exploited the image or voice of well-known people, mainly political leaders. The survey points to 36 instances of fake content targeting President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, 33 targeting former President Jair Bolsonaro, and 30 targeting Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes.

According to the document, the use of WhatsApp for spreading misinformation plunged from almost 90 percent in 2024 to 46 percent in 2025. In the observatory’s view, this does not mean that fake news has decreased there, but rather that there is now a greater dispersion of platforms.

In addition to Facebook, Instagram, Threads, WhatsApp, and X – which were already popular – Kwai and Tiktok, both short video social networks, have also become more relevant in the dissemination of fakes.