FRAMING THE SYNTHETIC: A REVIEW OF HOW AI-GENERATED AND FAKE-NEWS NARRATIVES ARE CONSTRUCTED AND CONTESTED ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Abstract

Generative artificial intelligence has revived old anxieties about deception and manipulation online, and most existing scholarship still approaches synthetic and fake-news content mainly as a detection problem — asking whether audiences can be fooled and how false material might be screened out. This paper takes a different, complementary route by applying the lens of framing. Building on Entman’s (1993) account of framing as the selective emphasis given to certain problem definitions, causal stories, moral judgements, and proposed remedies, it kind of draws together existing research on how AI-generated and fake-news narratives are built spread interpreted and pushed back against on social media in that messy, ongoing way. The scattered literature is brought into one conceptual model spanning five linked stages — construction, algorithmic amplification, audience processing, resulting outcomes, and counter-framing — shaped throughout by the prevailing opinion climate (spiral of silence) and by levels of media and digital literacy. A central debate running through the review is whether the dangers of generative-AI misinformation have been overstated: supply-side accounts that stress the threat of fabricated content are weighed against evidence suggesting that demand and distribution, not production capacity, are the real bottleneck. The review also considers how synthetic media may harm public discourse less by convincing people of particular falsehoods than by spreading generalised doubt and weakening trust in news, and it traces how counter-framing efforts — fact-checking, debunking, and inoculation — meet with mixed success against manipulative narratives. Three gaps emerge from this synthesis: a heavy skew toward Global-North evidence, a near-total absence of frame-analytic work on synthetic content specifically, and very little indexed research from South Asia, Pakistan included. The paper closes by sketching a framing-centred, computationally informed, and comparative research agenda suited to communication scholarship that takes platform dynamics and the Global South seriously.