Reporters Without Borders (RSF)

Reporters Without Borders (RSF — Reporters Sans Frontières) is a Paris-based international press freedom organisation founded in 1985 in Montpellier, France, by four journalists — Robert Ménard, Rémy Loury, Jacques Molénat, and Émilien Jubineau. It is among the largest press freedom organisations globally, with 15 international bureaus and correspondents in 149 countries, approximately 100 staff, a France-registered budget of approximately €6 million, and UN consultative status since 2005. RSF's primary mandate is press freedom advocacy and journalist protection, but its AI programme has produced original investigations documenting how artificial intelligence tools are being deployed against journalists — fabricating their voices and images, and flooding information ecosystems with synthetic disinformation — placing RSF in the movement's investigative infrastructure as well as its advocacy layer.

AI harm investigations

Deepfake targeting of journalists. In a study published February 4, 2026, RSF documented 100 cases of journalists targeted by deepfakes across 27 countries between December 2023 and December 2025 — the field's first systematic documentation of synthetic media as a journalist-targeting tool at scale. Women made up 74 percent of victims; 13 percent of those women were targeted with pornographic deepfakes, a form of gender-based violence against press professionals. Reported harms ranged from fraud (fake audio mimicking journalists' voices soliciting money from contacts) to defamation (fabricated statements attributed to reporters) to physical threats (deepfakes placing journalists' faces on threatening content). Cases spanned the United States, Portugal, Democratic Republic of Congo, Slovakia, South Africa, Argentina, France, and India. RSF's recommendations called for criminal penalties against malicious deepfake creators, platform-side content authentication and labelling mandates, and newsroom implementation of content-marking systems.

Generative AI cloning of French-language media in Africa. An investigation published June 2, 2025, RSF documented the use of generative AI to fabricate audio and video content impersonating Radio France Internationale (RFI), France 24, and Agence France-Presse (AFP) in Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Senegal. AI-synthesized broadcasts simulated news programs with cloned voices discussing politically sensitive topics, then circulated across social media platforms and WhatsApp networks. Individual clips accumulated over 100,000 views despite audibly robotic AI synthesis quality. RSF tracked the spread through social media monitoring, documenting a template for AI-powered information operations targeting the French-speaking African media environment, where public trust in established French public broadcasting is a specific and exploitable vector.

AI Charter in Media

In July 2023, RSF launched the AI Charter in Media initiative, convening a 21-member international committee from 13 countries to develop binding principles, rights, and obligations for media professionals working with AI-based systems. Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa, founder and CEO of Rappler, chairs the committee. Ten organisations joined as formal partners, including the Committee to Protect Journalists, the International Press Institute, the World Association of News Publishers, the European Broadcasting Union, the Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union, and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. The initiative addresses editorial independence, information-integrity standards, algorithmic amplification risks to journalism, and the displacement of original journalism by AI-generated synthetic content in search and recommendation systems.

World Press Freedom Index and Journalism Trust Initiative

RSF's annual World Press Freedom Index — evaluating conditions in 180 countries, launched in 2002 — has centred increasingly on AI-enabled threats to journalism. The 2023 edition, themed "journalism threatened by fake content industry", documented political actors systematically deploying AI-generated disinformation in 118 of 180 countries surveyed. The 2024 edition identified the "increased loss of technological control due to the rise of generative AI" as an accelerating structural threat to journalism's epistemic foundations.

The Journalism Trust Initiative (JTI), launched in 2019 and adopted by nearly 2,400 media outlets globally, is RSF's structural intervention in the information-integrity ecosystem: a voluntary certification standard documenting a media outlet's editorial independence, ownership transparency, and professional standards. As AI systems increasingly determine content distribution and ranking, RSF positions the JTI as the human-verified credential layer that distinguishes certified journalism from synthetic content at algorithmic scale — accountability infrastructure for an information environment where content provenance can no longer be assumed.