Navigating Reality and War During the Age of AI Propaganda
Angry Planet
Matthew Gault
4.2 • 898 Ratings
🗓️ 5 June 2026
⏱️ 60 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On the morning of April 21, Trump posted an image of eight women on Truth Social, claimed they were Iranian dissidents set to be executed, and demanded that Tehran release them. Detractors, and several Iranian sources, claimed the women were AI-generated. A day later Trump claimed the women would no longer be executed and that he’d saved them.
The truth is that the women are real and many are still in danger. Trump’s post made real Iranian women who protested the Iranian regime appear fake. The story speaks to a moment we’re in where it’s become impossible to parse truth from lies online. This was already difficult before AI-generated pictures and video. Now it feels impossible.
On this episode of Angry Planet, Mahsa Alimardani is here to tell us the story. Alimardani is the Associate Director of Technology Threats and Opportunities at WITNESS.
- Eight real women turned into AI propaganda
- Real crimes bastardized into regime propaganda
- “We need to come to terms with the fact that our information environment is structurally different.”
- Content Credentials as a partial solution
- How AI is supercharging our chosen reality tunnels
- The cycle of uprising and repression in Iran
- The structure of Iran’s internet and how its blackouts work
- Domestic intranet as an alternative form of communication
- AI-generated Lego propaganda videos
- Iran Reframed
- Explosive Media’s deep connections to the Islamic Republic
- Politics as fandom, fandom as politics
- “Everything is becoming flattened.”
- “The onus on the person scrolling is a bit unfair.”
The Real Iranian Women Protesters Trump Made Look Synthetic
In the Room With Iran’s Social Media Savants
How AI Content Detection is Being Weaponized in the Iran War
Iran Is Winning the AI Slop Propaganda War
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. |
| 0:17.7 | Hello and welcome to another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. |
| 0:21.7 | I am Matthew Galt. |
| 0:22.8 | We are back. |
| 0:23.6 | Yes, there are more shows happening. |
| 0:26.0 | Lori not. |
| 0:26.9 | I'm still alive. |
| 0:28.6 | We're going to talk about something today that has been kind of driving me a little crazy. |
| 0:33.9 | I think it's been making a lot of the people in my life crazy. |
| 0:36.9 | And I can't think of a better guest to kind of get into all of it. |
| 0:41.2 | She's been covering it for quite some time and quite well. |
| 0:43.4 | Will you introduce yourself? |
| 0:45.0 | Yeah. |
| 0:45.3 | Hi, Matthew. |
| 0:46.0 | Thanks for having me. |
| 0:47.5 | I'm Masa Ali Mardani. |
| 0:49.8 | I am the Associate Director for Technology Threats and Opportunities at the Human Rights Organization Witness, which is preoccupied with defending reality, audio, visual evidence in the age of AI. |
| 1:07.1 | And I have been kind of working in the digital rights realm for, I guess, almost 15 years now |
| 1:14.4 | and doing academic and civil society work for a while. |
| 1:20.4 | And I am Iranian and I have studied, you know, the Iranian Internet and Iranian communications |
| 1:25.9 | for a while as well, on top of all |
| 1:28.8 | that other stuff that I do. |
... |
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