Deepfakes and Synthetic Media: The Emerging Threat to Large-Scale Public Gatherings

Artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled synthetic media, including deepfake audio, video, imagery, and text, has emerged as one of the most consequential additions to the threat environment for large-scale public gatherings. Generative AI (GenAI) tools capable of producing highly realistic but fabricated content have become widely accessible since 2020, sharply lowering the barrier to entry for sophisticated influence operations. Since 2021, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has assessed that malicious actors will almost certainly leverage synthetic content to conduct cyber and foreign influence operations, expanding on traditional tactics with greater speed, persuasiveness, and scale.

Large-scale mass gatherings, including concerts, festivals, political conventions, and sporting events, to include FIFA World Cup 2026 (FWC26), present especially attractive targets. These venues concentrate large, emotionally charged audiences within compressed information environments where rapid perception shifts can generate disproportionate psychological, operational, and reputational effects. Threats may involve not only fully synthetic deepfakes but also hybrid manipulations that alter authentic content in ways that may be harder to detect and easier to weaponize.

This white paper characterizes the deepfake and synthetic media threat to large-scale events, including threat actors and motivations along with observed tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) across pre-event, event, and post-event phases. It also provides operationally relevant mitigation guidance for event organizers, law enforcement, and security practitioners. The threat environment now includes the generation of synthetic content that can overwhelm information environments, crowd out trusted signals, degrade trust in legitimate communications, and increasingly target broadcast systems, financial markets, and high-visibility individuals in real time. The growing reliance on connected digital infrastructure, including mobile ticketing, high-speed venue connectivity, and Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled services, further expands the risk surface, creating additional pathways through which manipulated, misleading, or synthetic information can influence operational systems, public communications, and real-time decision-making.