My mother, born in 1950, was sitting in a large red IKEA chair a few months ago, listening to something on her phone. I could not hear the audio at first. Then a few words broke through: Barron Trump, choking, schoolteacher.

I leaned over her shoulder. She was watching what looked like a documentary. It had the pacing and tone of cable television, the slow narration, the swelling pauses, the promise that something meaningful was unfolding. But it was all synthetic. The images were stiff. The voices flat. The story assembled from fragments.

The plot was simple: a couple from Missouri, schoolteachers, ordinary people, came to New York for a rare night out. They chose Trump Tower. A splurge. A story about aspiration. Then the turn. The husband begins to choke. The wife panics. The narrator continues, calm and steady, never quite human.

“At that moment, Barron Trump walked into the room. He saw the choking schoolteacher and approached, his tall frame filling their view.”

The voice lingered on that detail. The scene stretched on, minute after minute. This went on for half an hour.

I stopped her and explained what she was watching. Not a documentary. Not reporting. A machine-made story stitched together to hold attention. She nodded. She understood. But she did not care.

“It’s on here, so it’s fine,” she said.

That sentence matters more than the video.

There is nothing new in praise stories. Hagiography has followed power for as long as power has existed. What has changed is the container. This material now arrives dressed as fact. It borrows the grammar of television, the tone of authority used by networks like TLC and Discovery Channel, and it slips into the same stream as everything else. There is no clear border between the real and the fabricated. Not for her, and not for many others.

“This is my news,” she said.

That is the line that should give pause. Not because the content is extreme. It is not. It is mild. It is almost boring. But it replaces something older, a habit of trusting institutions, flawed as they were, with something far thinner.

So the question is not whether this specific video is dangerous. On its own, it is not. It passes the time. It fills a gap. It sits alongside the other things she watches, including endless AI-narrated pieces about Princess Diana, stories that drift between fact and invention without much concern for either.

The real question is slower and harder. What happens when a generation that did not grow up with this technology accepts it without resistance? When the signal and the noise share the same voice, the same authority?

We tell ourselves that media literacy is the answer. That people should know better. But that assumes time, patience, and a kind of discipline that even younger audiences struggle to maintain. My mother watch to watch “the news” and wants to stay informed. She is adapting in the only way available to her. She watches what is in front of her.

Her children practice media hygiene. We check sources. We cross-reference. We distrust what feels too neat. But those are learned habits. They come from years spent online, years spent being fooled and then learning not to be fooled again.

Should we expect her to do the same?

Or is this simply the new shape of information, one that does not ask for belief so much as attention, one that does not argue but repeats, until repetition itself becomes a kind of truth?

The Propaganda Problem

The real issue is that videos like the ones my mother was watching are being used to wage war against unity.

UK-based Refute has published a report on foreign interference in recent European elections, pulling data from Romania, Moldova, and other active fronts. The content that is flowing out of Russian propaganda systems is AI slop, the kind of posts and images that you see your conspiratorial uncle sharing on Facebook. And more and more of this propaganda is focused on video that describes the world as a lawless and terrible place, threatened by the awful Other.

The report makes a simple point: Interference is no longer a last-minute push or a few bad actors. It is planned early, coordinated, and spread across the entire election cycle.

The aim is not subtle. The protagonists want to split the electorate and to convince people, especially those abroad, that their country is failing. The diaspora, folks like my mother who came from Poland in 1974, imagine their home countries as they were when they left: poor. The answer? Convince that powerful voting block that it’s up to them to save their homeland.

Further, these videos help politicians, usually illiberal ones, win.

“If you’re a politician running to be elected, mathematically speaking, the best strategy is to divide the electorate and then only appeal to part of it,” Galu said. “That’s a much easier way to get into office than to try to speak to everyone.”

In Romania’s 2025 presidential election, Refute tracked about 32,500 TikTok videos backing populist candidates. Many showed signs of coordination, copied content, reused formats, and AI-generated media. The audience was not just local. About 24% of Romanians live abroad, but nearly half of the engagement came from outside the country. That points to deliberate diaspora targeting.

Moldova saw a heavier operation. The report points to a mix of vote buying, online campaigns, and activity tied to embassy networks. Refute identified more than 16,000 bot-like accounts during the election period. Intelligence estimates cited in the report put spending at around $150 million. That’s money that used to go to billboards and TV ads.

What emerges is a layered system. Bots, influencers, and synthetic media work together. Content moves across TikTok, Telegram, and Facebook. Organic and artificial engagement blur into each other, which makes attribution hard and slow.

Galu is blunt about the imbalance.

“We have to think about this information warfare as pretty much the same thing as conventional warfare. We are in a war situation, it’s just fought with different means on different grounds,” he said. “It’s a very low-effort, very high-yield activity. For us, the cost is much higher because we need certainty and clarity, and that requires compute and data.”

The campaigns lean on familiar themes. Defense spending framed as waste. Calls for accommodation with Russia. Early claims that elections cannot be trusted.

Hungary shows similar patterns ahead of the April 2026 parliamentary vote. European security sources cited in the report say the playbook matches what was used in Moldova.

The report lands on an interesting conclusion. The weak point is no longer the ballot itself. It is the information environment around it. By the time officials react, the narrative is already set.

“Once disinformation campaigns begin, it is extremely hard to rein it back in again. Prevention is far more cost-effective than damage control.”

Galu argues for continuous monitoring and automated analysis. Right now, most responses come too late and at too small a scale.

What does this have to do with AI video? Plenty. The tools that were used to engage my 76-year-old Polish mother are the same ones being used to enrage small-town Romanians or older Hungarians. The models that are creating space aliens and new Avengers clips are the same ones telling us that Haitians are eating the cats and dogs. These tools, like so many forms of media before them, are simultaneously vital to building conversations and frightening in their power. It’s up to us, then, to educate folks who might be lured in, although, as my mom said, this is their news.