Washington – Social media users have been spreading false images linking prominent U.S. politicians, including New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, researchers said Tuesday.
Disinformation watchdog NewsGuard reported that seven such AI-generated images racked up more than 21 million views on Elon Musk’s platform X, highlighting how technology is blurring the line between fact and fiction online.
The U.S. Justice Department recently released over three million documents, photos, and videos related to Epstein, who died by suicide in 2019. While the files involve some high-profile figures, Mamdani and former Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley are not among them.
Despite this, conservative social media accounts circulated AI-generated images claiming to show Epstein with Mamdani as a child, and some also included Mamdani’s mother, filmmaker Mira Nair. Google’s AI tool Gemini detected invisible watermarks confirming the images were artificially created.
Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones shared one image on X, claiming the AI chatbot Grok had verified it as real, even though AI chatbots are unreliable for fact-checking.
Other fakes included a screenshot of an email allegedly from Haley to Epstein. NewsGuard found no evidence of the email in the Justice Department files, and the dates in the screenshot were incorrect.
In Latin America, social media users circulated a doctored photo showing Epstein with Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, which NewsGuard traced back to a digitally altered image of Epstein with a businessman.
Similar AI-driven fakery has targeted other politicians, including Canada’s Mark Carney, showing him with Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, though investigators confirmed those images were also artificially generated.
These cases show how AI tools and digital editing are being misused to spread false narratives about public figures.
