Any journalist who’s covering an election this year — the biggest election year in history — should read the feature by Andrew that we published this week. Headlined “Indian journalists are on the frontline in the fight against election deepfakes,” it discusses how journalists in India are finding that “standard reporting strategies” and fact-checking methods like reverse image searches are no longer enough to verify whether images, audio, and video are real or fake.

One thing I like about this story is that it takes the narrative beyond “journalists are overwhelmed” to look into actual solutions and things that Indian journalists on the ground are doing to verify or debunk deepfakes. That “often requires building relationships with academic researchers, disinformation-focused nonprofits, and developers behind commercial AI detection tools, within India and abroad,” Andrew writes. He notes the benefits for reporters of working with local researchers. “The beauty of our approach has been, with respect to audio, that it is multilingual,” Mayank Vatsa, who runs a verification tool from his lab at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Jodhpur, “and, with respect to video and images, that it encompasses the diversity of skin tone in the Indian context…if you have language diversity available to you to train on, then you actually get much better performance, and higher confidence.”

Still, Indian journalists sometimes find more success working with researchers abroad. Nilesh Christopher, an independent journalist based in Bangalore (and a 2024-2025 Nieman Fellow), told Andrew that political self-censorship is a problem. Indian organizations, fearing political backlash, will often only agree to do forensic analysis off the record. “Once the startups weigh in on a specific political issue, they face the risk of the politician coming after them,” Christopher said, adding, “I’m quite confident that none of them would take up detection if it’s a very contentious high-stakes election issue…that hinders and pushes journalists behind in the news cycle as we try to report the truth.”

Even after India’s elections are over on June 1, these issues will remain. “While the current infrastructure for deepfake detection is being pressure tested in India right now,” Andrew writes, “the reporting strategies being carved out by journalists during the election offer a preview into the challenges that lie ahead for other newsrooms around the world.”