On a February evening in 2025, Nusrat Tabassum opened her phone to find a sexually explicit video of herself -- a deepfake that within hours, had spread across thousands of WhatsApp groups and Facebook pages.
For Tabassum, a student leader who had helped topple Bangladesh’s authoritarian regime just months earlier, this marked the ninth documented disinformation attack she had endured. Her crime? Announcing her candidacy for parliament.
Tabassum’s experience is not isolated. It represents a coordinated disinformation campaign targeting the women who led Bangladesh’s July 2024 uprising and now dare to claim the political power their activism earned.
Following the uprising, many female student leaders joined the National Citizen Party (NCP). This new political formation emerged in February 2025 as the first student-led party in Bangladesh’s history. Tasneem Zara, Samanta Sharmin, Nusrat Tabassum, and other student activists became prominent leaders and electoral candidates. Their entry into formal politics triggered a dramatic escalation in disinformation attacks.
A recent research, “Disinformation Targeting Female Political Figures in Bangladesh,” investigates how gendered disinformation is produced, circulated, and weaponized against female leaders and student activists in Bangladesh.
It highlights the dominant patterns of gendered disinformation during a heightened political situation. It reviewed 40 distinct fact-checked reports concerning 12 female student activists, constituting 22.7% of the overall sample.
Between 2024 and 2025, at least 12 female leaders and student activists faced systematic disinformation attacks involving deepfakes, fabricated news reports, death rumours, and sexually explicit material falsely attributed to them.
Farzana Sithi endured sophisticated deepfake videos showing her dancing in nightclubs she never visited. Nusrat Tabassum faced an explicit adult video deliberately misattributed to her. Nafsin Mehanaz Azireen’s photographs were digitally altered to suggest provocative clothing and fabricated intimate moments. Faria Rahman Farah’s image was manipulated to depict compromising situations.
Fake news photocards weaponized trusted media brands. Perpetrators impersonated Prothom Alo, Samakal, Jugantor, and Jamuna TV to attribute false statements to activists.
Intimidation through death rumours targeted Lucky Akhter and Sinthiya Zaheen Ayesha. False claims that they were killed created fear throughout activist networks. Political conspiracies alleged foreign visa bans, nepotism in government jobs, and secret marriages to army officers.
Technology escalated from simple photo editing to AI-generated deepfakes and fabricated social media profiles. Some activists faced sustained disinformation campaigns. Nusrat Tabassum alone endured at least nine documented false claims.
This analysis reveals systematic patterns in gendered disinformation -- several core strategies that work in combination to silence women’s political participation.
This study identifies an emergent pattern, a systematic orchestration of hybrid artifacts that combine outlet-style photocards, altered images, and fabricated narratives into single packages.
These tactics are designed for virality: A doctored intimate image embedded in a photocard headline alleging corruption provides both “visual proof” and institutional framing, increasing the chance of audience acceptance and re-sharing.
Apart from deepfake videos and edited photographs, it highlights the use of a new form of disinformation, outlet-style photocards, as a major tactic to target women activists. This is how perpetrators systematically impersonated respected media outlets of Bangladesh.
It has transformed these outlet-style photocards with false claims into a legitimate “news event,” increasing the possibility of secondary victimization when audiences reshare or react to that content.
During the July 2024 uprising, at least 16% of disinformation targeting female leaders and student activists was shared, using the photocards of Prothom Alo, Somoy TV, Independent TV, Jamuna TV, and Channel 24.
This tactic exploits several social mechanisms.
First, it leverages the trust that people place in established media brands. A claim attributed to a recognized news source carries immediate credibility.
Second, the professional visual design triggers automatic processing -- viewers scroll quickly through social media feeds and make snap judgments based on visual cues rather than careful verification.
Third, photocards are highly shareable. Their compact, self-contained format makes them perfect for viral spread across messaging apps like WhatsApp and social media platforms.
The consistency of disinformation techniques -- photocards, AI deepfakes, gendered claims -- suggests shared playbooks and coordination.
It has been identified that approximately 700 Facebook pages, postured as news outlets but functioning as disinformation hubs. These pages created centralized operations, disseminating identical content across multiple platforms within seconds.
Disinformation campaigns against female student activists in Bangladesh constitutes deliberate political warfare. These campaigns are designed to erase their contributions, damage their reputations, and discourage future women’s participation. These extend far beyond individual activists to threaten the entire foundation of rights-based mobilization in Bangladesh’s democratic transition.
Another research has identified how the interim government faces disinformation campaigns led by the Awami League and allies that deliberately conflate women’s political participation with religious extremism.
This strategic conflation matters because it forces female activists into impossible defensive positions: Any assertion of gender equality and traditional values can be weaponized to argue women should not seek political power.
Research on gendered disinformation in South Asian contexts demonstrates how attacks often layer gender with ethnicity, religion, and class through digital tools. This layering makes it impossible for women to defend themselves along any single axis of identity.
The sophistication evident in Bangladesh’s case -- 700 coordinated Facebook pages, AI-generated deepfakes, algorithmically-optimized distribution, and the documented targeting of at least 12 prominent student activists through 40 distinct fact-checked reports -- demonstrates a dangerous strategy to erode democracy and human rights.
The question facing Bangladesh and democracies globally is whether societies will allow this coordinated architecture of exclusion to succeed in preventing women who risked everything for political change from governing the countries they helped liberate.
As one female student leader told researchers: “We don’t want to go back to how things were before.” Whether that aspiration can be realized depends on recognizing gendered disinformation for what it truly represents: Not individual harassment but systematic political warfare designed to maintain patriarchal power structures in the digital age.
Zulker Naeen is Research Coordinator, FactWatch and Adjunct Faculty, Department of Media Studies and Journalism (MSJ), University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB).
