Opposition parties in Italy have filed a complaint with the country's communications watchdog regarding a series of AI-generated images published on social media by Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini’s far-right League party. The images have been described as “racist, Islamophobic and xenophobic.”
The center-left Democratic party (PD), along with the Greens and Left Alliance, submitted the complaint to Agcom, the Italian communications regulatory authority, alleging that the fake images used by the League contained “almost all categories of hate speech.”
Over the past month, numerous AI-generated photos have appeared on the League’s social media channels, including Facebook, Instagram, and X. The images often depict men of color, frequently armed with knives, allegedly attacking women or police officers.
PD Senator Antonio Nicita stated that the images published by Salvini’s party and generated by AI contain "almost all categories of hate speech, from racism and xenophobia to Islamophobia." He added, "They are using AI to target specific categories of people – immigrants, Arabs – who are portrayed as potential criminals, thieves, and rapists."
Nicita also said that the images are not only violent but also deceptive, because by blurring the faces of the victims, it appears as though the party wants to protect the identity of the person attacked, misleading users into believing the photo is real, and inciting hatred.
Francesco Emilio Borrelli, an MP for the Greens and Left Alliance, said that AI generates content based on instructions, and in this case, it was instructed to generate images of Black people robbing an elderly woman or a frightened woman, as part of a strategy to create fear among citizens.
A spokesperson for Salvini’s party confirmed that "some of the pictures" featured on their social media channels had been "generated digitally."
In a statement, the party said that each post is based on true reports from Italian newspapers, with names, dates, and places, and that the point is not the image, but the fact. The statement also said that if reality seems too harsh, one should not blame those who report it, but those who make it so, and that if it is about a crime, it is hard to accompany the news with cheerful or reassuring images.
Salvatore Romano, the head of research at the nonprofit AI Forensics, stated that the League's pictures bear "all the hallmarks of artificial intelligence." He noted that they are out-of-context photos in which the subject is in the foreground and the rest is entirely blurred, and expressed concern that these AI-generated images are becoming ever more realistic.
The complaint to Agcom cites several examples of images thought to have been digitally generated, saying they have appeared alongside the branding of reputable mainstream media outlets which have reported on the crimes mentioned but not used images of the alleged perpetrators.
One example provided is a League post that says, "A foreigner attacks the train conductor," accompanied by an image of a man of color with his fist raised. The original headline in Il Resto del Carlino reads: "He attacks the [female] train conductor and sparks panic on board." The article mentions the suspect is a "foreigner" but does not provide further details on nationality, and there was no photograph of the alleged attack.
Another image featured in the complaint shows a mother and father in Islamic dress appearing to shout angrily at a girl, "thus feeding racial and Islamophobic prejudice." Il Giorno, the newspaper that is cited, makes no reference in its report to the religion of either the family or the girl allegedly abused by her parents, beyond saying the child had attended Arabic language school. There was no photograph of the family.
The use of AI-generated images for propaganda by far-right parties is a growing phenomenon that entered the mainstream around last year’s European elections, when images designed to stoke fears over immigration or demonize leaders such as Emmanuel Macron began circulating on social media.
Romano stated that far-right parties have not only continued to generate fake images for propaganda but have also increased their use at a time when AI tools have improved content quality, making the phenomenon all the more worrying.
Romano says that despite social platforms being obliged to take steps to anticipate these risks – for example by adding a label specifying that an image has been generated by AI – in practice, this mechanism is almost always ineffective.
When asked if the League was aware that the images could generate hate speech, a spokesperson for Salvini’s party said that their solidarity goes to the victims, not the perpetrators, and that if denouncing crimes committed by foreigners means "xenophobia," perhaps the problem is not the word but those who use it to censor debate, and that they will continue to denounce, with strong words and images, what others prefer to ignore.
If Agcom deems the flagged content offensive, it can, under the EU’s Digital Services Act, order posts to be taken down, accounts to be removed, and social media platforms to be fined for failing to police user behavior. In 2023, Agcom fined Meta €5.85m and ordered the removal of dozens of accounts for breaching the ban on gambling advertising.
Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, was approached for comment. X declined to comment.
