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Research on synthetic media has concentrated on production, asking whether political content is fabricated and how it might be detected. However, this panel argues that the political force of generative media is settled downstream of production, by a second, less examined system that determines which synthetic actors and artefacts become perceptible, to whom and on what terms.
That system is not singular. The engagement-ranked public feed is one regional architecture among several, mistaken for the general case. Political communication elsewhere moves through messaging graphs that allocate visibility by social topology, and through superapps that fuse ranking with payment and identity. To treat the ranked feed as the world, and every other architecture as deviation, is already to have answered the political question in advance. This panel declines that presumption and takes as its object the infrastructures of visibility in the plural.
Their provision is engineered and uneven. Detection tooling, provenance signals, safeguards and language coverage are allocated by design, and the markets that supply much of the training data and moderation labour receive the thinnest protection. The differential is not a periphery varying around a centre but a distribution of political perceptibility that no election has authorised.
The panel welcomes theoretical, comparative, experimental and audit-based contributions. Do these infrastructures privilege synthetic political communication, directly or as a by-product of engagement prediction, personalisation, labelling, moderation and monetisation? Are emotionally optimised synthetic visuals advantaged by engagement-based ranking? Can provenance signals and public-interest ranking objectives restore a measure of accountability? And who is permitted to measure the apparatus, in which languages and under whose access terms, given that knowledge of synthetic visibility is itself produced from the centre it examines?
Work grounded in messaging-graph publics, superapp ecologies, low-resource language markets and high-forwarding environments is particularly encouraged, as is work that declines to treat one model of the democratic public as the measure of all. By connecting generation to distribution, and by refusing a single architecture of visibility, the panel asks not whether political information is authentic but how the uneven infrastructures of synthetic visibility are redistributing democratic attention and political power.