'Citizens Against Mamdani' Accounts Reportedly Posted AI-Generated Videos of Fictional New Yorkers to Simulate Political Opposition

November 5, 2025

In New York, accounts linked to 'Citizens Against Mamdani' reportedly disseminated AI-generated videos, allegedly featuring fictional constituents criticizing mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani across Instagram, TikTok, and X. Some of these videos were found to display a Sora watermark, and at least one clip was assessed as highly likely to be a deepfake by forensic reviewers. The campaign seemed to simulate grassroots opposition and attracted significant engagement.

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Alleged deployer
unknown-social-media-account-operators, information-manipulation-actors, citizens-against-mamdani-social-media-accounts, citizens-against-mamdani, information-manipulation-actors-targeting-zohran-mamdani
Alleged developer
openai, deepfake-technology-developers, synthetic-audio-generation-technology-developers
Alleged harmed parties
zohran-mamdani, voters-in-new-york, general-public-of-new-york, epistemic-integrity, american-social-media-users, democratic-integrity

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Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1425

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

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