E Impressions from my feeds in recent weeks: disturbing videos of raids by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Footage of demonstrators in inflatable frog costumes dancing in front of ICE headquarters in Portland — an attempt to disarm Trump’s war rhetoric with humor.
Excerpts from “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” in which the Governor of Illinois, J. B. Pritzker, ironic ally leads through the “war zone” Chicago, as Trump characterized it. The rapper Adamn Killa, as he adapts the TikTok trend “Arrest me, Daddy” to protest ICE and police violence. The arrest of journalist Debbie Brockman, brutally pushed to the ground.
Since Trump ordered the deployment of the National Guard in Portland and Chicago in late September and early October, countless such images and film clips have circulated, ranging from official propaganda clips of Homeland Security, cut like trailers for action movies and underscored with “Deportation will Continue,” to influencer videos that seek to prove on the ground that Portland “in reality” is not a “hellhole.”
Digital Strategy Game
Between staging and counter-staging, the boundaries are increasingly blurred. Facts no longer appear as given, but as something produced, disputed, and reframed in real time. In this digital strategy game, where every interpretation is contested, the progressive side increasingly asks: which strategy actually endures—and which does not.
Some try to defuse Trump’s martial image of the protesters with costumes and humor; others rely on AI-generated videos of arrests and assaults that never happened, to attract attention through outrage and anger against ICE.
A decidedly double-edged strategy, one tends to criticize. Whoever produces fake videos — even if labeled as such — is playing Trump straight into his hands. For wouldn’t such AI videos not destroy the credibility of all images? If no one knows which video is real and which is generated, any government can simply dismiss any inconvenient recording as a forgery.
Post-Truth Media Landscape
But isn’t this critique short-sighted? Aren’t such AI videos the only logical response to a media landscape that has long been post-fact? The bitter truth is: visual credibility has already been destroyed — and not just by AI.
While real footage can be deleted at any time because it violates opaque policies, AI videos on major platforms usually stay online, since they do not depict “real” violence, thus do not violate rules and are easily regenerable (whereas real documentaries of emotional footage are inherently rarer). Content moderation follows not a moral but an economic logic: the false is simply more platform-compatible than the true.
Naive Demand for Authenticity
In such a media landscape, AI videos are not sabotage of the truth, but its consistent continuation. If truth remains visible only through simulation, then the self-optimization mantra “Fake it till you make it” becomes a political strategy. And if the opposing side has long since deftly used propaganda, the demand for documentary authenticity does not appear morally superior — but naive.
AI videos do not show what is, but what could be — or how something feels. “This video is AI. It shows what we are going through in the real world,” reads, for instance, beneath an arrest scene. They are emotional stand-ins for a reality that one cannot or should not show.
In the end, perhaps there remains only one uncomfortable realization: perhaps the demand for documentary truth is now only a nostalgic echo from a time when images were still evidence. Today we must bid farewell to this evidentiary character once and for all.
