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Gulf brands spend millions monitoring competitors, tracking campaigns and managing reputations. Teams are built around anticipating what rivals may do next.
Yet a different kind of threat is emerging – one that needn’t come from competitors, and one that most marketing departments are ill-equipped to handle.
It is synthetic misinformation.
For years, misinformation was a human problem: rumours, misreporting and bad actors spreading false narratives. Today, it is increasingly a technological one. Generative AI has made it easy to fabricate convincing content at scale, and in formats audiences instinctively trust.
The threat isn’t hypothetical. The UAE’s minister of economy, Abdullah bin Touq Al Marri, has publicly disowned deepfake videos circulating on social media that purport to show him promoting investment schemes. “I will never put my face in front of that and say ‘come and invest in shares’,” he said. “It’s actually a deepfake.”
The tools required to spread convincing false narratives are no longer specialised. Open-source models and consumer-grade applications can generate photorealistic images, clone voices and forge documents with minimal effort. A fabricated press release announcing a scandal. A doctored video of an executive making a controversial statement. A wave of fake reviews that tank a hotel’s rating overnight.
None of this requires a state actor or a sophisticated cybercrime cartel. It requires time, intent and a laptop.
For GCC brands, the risk is amplified by certain regional characteristics. Corporate leaders are often highly visible, both in media and on social platforms, a phenomenon that made the Al Marri deepfakes so effective.
Large-scale developments such as real estate, infrastructure and giga-projects attract global attention and significant financial interest.
And the broader geopolitical context means narratives travel fast and are interpreted in multiple ways. Against the backdrop of war in Iran, the reputations of Gulf states and the companies within them are particularly exposed.
In such conditions, perception moves faster than verification. A lie can circle the world before the truth has booted up its browser.
The Gulf’s next reputational crisis may be caused by something that never happened, but that looked real enough, for long enough, to matter
A synthetic attack doesn’t need to be perfect to be effective. It needs only to be plausible for long enough to spread.
Research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has found that false information travels significantly faster on social networks than true information, largely because it is engineered to provoke an emotional response. AI simply accelerates that dynamic.
There is also an insidious corollary to misinformation: the liar’s dividend. In a world where synthetic fakes are commonplace, anyone facing a genuine scandal can simply claim the content is fabricated. Plausible deniability scales with the technology. The same tools that enable attacks also enable deflection.
Governments in the region are responding. The UAE Cybersecurity Council has issued public warnings about deepfake threats, and Federal Decree-Law No 34 of 2021 on Combating Rumours and Cybercrimes imposes strict penalties on those who create or disseminate fabricated content.
Saudi Arabia’s anti-cybercrime law criminalises the spread of misinformation that threatens public security or national interests, and lawmakers are tightening that framework further.
Since Iran began attacking GCC states, authorities have been fast, efficient and firm in their handling of those accused of peddling digital deceit.
But regulation moves more slowly than technology, so a nascent but fast-growing market in corporate anti-disinformation services is taking shape. Wa’ed Ventures, the $500 million venture capital arm of Saudi Aramco, recently made a strategic investment in Resemble AI, a California-based company specialising in real-time deepfake detection.
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Globally, platforms such as Cyabra and ZeroFox – the latter an exhibitor at Dubai’s Gitex IT mega-conference – enable brands to monitor for fake profiles, coordinated narrative attacks and AI-generated content that targets their reputations. These tools are moving from novelty to necessity.
The response, however, must be proactive and structural; it is not just a matter of selecting the right vendor. Brands need pre-defined protocols for who verifies suspicious content, who responds, through which channels and how quickly. Time is critical in a synthetic misinformation scenario.
The longer false content circulates unchallenged, the more credible it becomes. Some organisations are beginning to treat this as a discipline in its own right: a hybrid of PR, cybersecurity and data science, involving scenario planning, role-play testing and early-detection systems.
The shift, ultimately, is philosophical. Reputation can no longer be treated as a narrative under brands’ control. It is a system that must be defended.
The uncomfortable reality is that the next major reputational crisis in the Gulf may not be caused by a competitor, a disgruntled customer or even a genuine mistake. It may be caused by something that never actually happened, but that looked real enough, for long enough, to matter.
In a world where perception drives value, that distinction may count for little.
Austyn Allison is an editorial consultant and journalist who has covered Middle East advertising since 2007
