Online Lies Are Getting Refugees Attacked, the U.N. Warns
On July 7, 2026, the United Nations refugee agency said online lies, hate speech and AI-generated deepfakes are inciting real-world harm to displaced people — cutting them off from aid and, it warned, feeding attacks. A UNHCR survey found that 93 percent of its staff had witnessed misinformation, disinformation or hate speech affecting the agency’s work, with women disproportionately targeted.
Online misinformation, hate speech and artificial-intelligence deepfakes are inciting real-world harm against refugees and the humanitarians who serve them, the United Nations refugee agency warned on July 7. Speaking at a briefing in Geneva tied to the AI for Good summit, UNHCR’s senior adviser on information integrity, Gisella Lomax, said the spread of such content was “exacerbating and inciting real-world harm to refugees and humanitarians,” the agency said.
Distorted and hostile narratives were making it harder for displaced people to find work, education and safety, UNHCR said, and in some cases were limiting or preventing their access to protection and life-saving assistance. “This can cause huge risks and even death,” the agency said, pointing to Libya, “where a wave of violent hate speech and dangerous misinformation incited hostility and abuse of refugees,” according to UNHCR.
A survey of the front line
A recent UNHCR survey found that 93 percent of staff respondents had witnessed misinformation, disinformation or hate speech affecting the delivery of the agency’s mandate, UNHCR reported. Women — among both refugees and staff — were being disproportionately targeted, the agency said.
Lomax said false and dehumanizing content was not confined to the screen. “Online rumours, false accusations, scapegoating and dehumanising speech have triggered protests and attacks,” she said. “In extreme cases, they have been linked to physical violence, killings, and are even a factor in forced displacement,” according to UNHCR.
Deepfakes aimed at aid workers
Generative AI, UNHCR said, is compounding the danger at scale. Among the examples the agency cited were AI-generated deepfake videos of the UNHCR Representative, online calls to share the GPS coordinates of staff members’ home addresses, and videos describing national staff as traitors to their country, UNHCR said.
Such fabrications, the agency said, are undermining trust in the humanitarian response and fueling an increase in “false, hostile narratives targeting operations and staff,” according to UNHCR. The warning was delivered as governments, technology firms and academics gathered in Geneva to discuss responses to the same information threats.
Libya, the warning’s example
UNHCR’s reference to Libya came as rights groups documented a sharp escalation there. On July 2, Human Rights Watch said anti-migrant rhetoric by rival Libyan authorities was fueling abuses, as officials expanded mass arrests, arbitrary detention and forced expulsions of refugees and migrants, and as xenophobic statements by officials drove protests and hate speech online, Human Rights Watch reported.
Amnesty International, in June, said the authorities had intensified a “xenophobic and racist crackdown” on refugees and migrants, with racially discriminatory mass arrests and unlawful collective expulsions, according to Amnesty International. Migrants and refugees held in Libya have long endured torture, sexual violence and forced labour, Al Jazeera has reported. During weeks of anti-migrant demonstrations, crowds gathered near UNHCR’s own offices in Tripoli, Human Rights Watch said.
A call to the platforms
UNHCR said it was responding with tools and partnerships, including an Information Integrity Response Toolkit now used by some 2,000 practitioners to guide risk assessments and community-based responses, the agency said. It urged technology, AI and social-media companies to “partner, invest and collaborate” with humanitarian organizations to protect displaced people online, according to UNHCR.
The sequence UNHCR described — content that dehumanizes a group, amplified to a mass audience online, arriving before real-world harm to the people it names — is one that human-rights bodies have documented in other crises. The agency framed the problem not as isolated abuse but as a systemic threat to the safety of the displaced and those who assist them, UNHCR said.