The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has issued an urgent public warning from Geneva, highlighting a growing global crisis where misinformation and hate speech are not merely digital nuisances, but direct catalysts for physical harm against vulnerable refugee populations. During the prestigious AI for Good Global Summit, UN officials underscored that the rising tide of hostile narratives—ranging from dehumanizing rhetoric to sophisticated deepfakes—is actively endangering both humanitarian staff and the millions of people fleeing conflict. As the world grapples with record levels of displacement, the UN is now calling on the global technology sector to stop treating these risks as secondary issues and to move toward an aggressive, collaborative effort to secure the digital landscape for the displaced.
The “information crisis” accompanying the current global displacement climate has reached a critical threshold, with UNHCR senior adviser on information integrity, Gisella Lomax, emphasizing that misinformation often moves faster than humanitarian aid. Online platforms have increasingly become breeding grounds for volatile rumors and scapegoating, which frequently spill over into the real world, inciting protests, physical attacks, and, in tragic instances, fatalities. By distorting the truth, these malicious campaigns do more than just incite violence; they fundamentally erode the ability of refugees to integrate into new societies by limiting their access to employment, education, and essential social services, thereby deepening their isolation and vulnerability.
Artificial intelligence has acted as a force multiplier for this turmoil, with the advent of generative AI making the fabrication of reality dangerously simple and inexpensive. UNHCR reports a disturbing surge in the usage of deepfake technology, which has been deployed to impersonate aid workers and manufacture false scenarios involving refugees, effectively undermining trust in humanitarian institutions at a time when that trust is most needed. These tools allow bad actors—including human smugglers and criminal traffickers—to exploit the digital sphere, deceiving desperate individuals with fabricated promises of safety or employment that instead lead them directly into life-threatening exploitation.
Despite the grave risks posed by unchecked AI capability, the United Nations maintains that the technology is not inherently malicious and could become a powerful ally in managing humanitarian disasters if developed and deployed responsibly. During the summit, the agency argued for a dual-pronged approach: strengthening content moderation to suppress life-threatening disinformation while simultaneously harnessing AI to predict needs, map crises, and streamline the distribution of aid. The goal is to move from a state of reactive crisis management to a proactive digital strategy where AI is used to verify facts and protect the integrity of information rather than destroy it.
The UNHCR is essentially issuing a “call to action” to the giants of the tech industry, insisting that they must invest in, partner with, and collaborate alongside humanitarian organizations to create meaningful safety guardrails. A primary focus of this request is for improved content moderation tools capable of functioning effectively in humanitarian contexts and supporting less-common languages, which are currently underserved by existing safety protocols. By systematizing these efforts and scaling them up, the international community hopes to counter the toxic narratives that fuel forced displacement and ensure that technology remains a tool for human empowerment rather than a weapon of exclusion.
The necessity of this intervention is underscored by the staggering scale of the current crisis, with figures indicating that 117.8 million people were forcibly displaced worldwide by the end of 2025. With a vast majority of these individuals hailing from just five nations—Venezuela, Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan, and Sudan—the pressure on international aid agencies to manage both physical and digital borders has never been greater. As the UN pushes for clearer AI standards, the message remains clear: the digital safety of the world’s most vulnerable populations is a fundamental component of their physical protection, and the tech sector’s cooperation is no longer optional in the fight to preserve human dignity in an increasingly connected, yet deeply divided, world.
