In the age of AI, deception doesn’t knock. It seeps. Morphs. Multiplies.

A fake video here. A whisper campaign there. A thousand bots blurring the line between fact and fiction. Elections are being edited. Truth is being deepfaked. And democracy being duped.

At the frontline of this invisible war is Wu Min Hsuan, aka Ttcat. He's an activist, researcher, and co-founder of Taiwan’s trailblazing Doublethink Lab. And he's chasing falsehoods. Mapping the machinery behind them.

Ttcat’s fight began in Taiwan’s civic tech movement, building open, participatory platforms for democracy. Until he realized the digital town square was being poisoned. Bots, trolls, and foreign actors weren’t just distorting debate – they were hijacking it.

Since then, he’s become one of the world’s sharpest analysts of China’s transnational propaganda apparatus,  exposing how the Chinese Communist Party deploys disinformation across borders, languages, and platforms. From pink-mode nationalism to outsourced content farms, his team at Doublethink Lab has uncovered how fake narratives are seeded, scaled, and swallowed.

He’s shown how deepfakes don’t need to go viral to cause harm, they just need to plant doubt. That influence operations aren’t loud, they’re deafening whispers that erode democratic trust over time. That Taiwan’s elections – like Ukraine’s resistance and India’s WhatsApp wars – are testbeds in an escalating global experiment: Can democracy survive synthetic reality?

Ttcat’s approach is forensic but philosophical. To him, disinformation is not just about lies, it’s about design. A slow blurring of reality through repetition, relatability, and reach. “Disinformation” he says, “isn’t just a content problem. It’s a power problem.”

He’s built open-source tools and immersive public education platforms like Escape the Mist, empowering users to identify, unlearn, and resist manipulation. He’s also trained civil society coalitions, advised governments, and collaborated with researchers from Oxford to Kyiv. 

But Ttcat also sounds the alarm on disinformation’s other edge: the risk that fact-checkers become censors, that watchdogs go rogue, and that “trust and safety” becomes a euphemism for unaccountable control. In his world, nuance is the only constant.

At SYNAPSE 2025, Ttcat will reveal how democracies are being hacked — not by force, but by fiction. He will take us inside the architecture of digital deceit: how AI-powered hoaxes, targeted memes, and foreign influence operations are subtly shaping what we believe and who we become.

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