Deepfakes Are a Distraction. The Real Threat Is Selectively True Narratives.

The communications industry has spent years preparing for the wrong enemy.

Boardrooms, crisis teams, and communications chiefs have all been drilling for deepfakes. But a new wave of reputation intelligence research suggests the more dangerous threat is already here, and it looks nothing like a synthetic video of a CEO saying something they didn't say.

It looks like something that's mostly true.

The Threat No One Is Training For

In May 2026, Entual, an AI-powered reputation intelligence platform, launched into open beta with a specific warning: the deepfake conversation has been a distraction.

"The more immediate risk today is rarely the deepfake," said Alex Jansen, Entual's founder. "It is the semi-truthful, truth-adjacent or selectively framed narrative pushed by credible actors."

This matters because selectively framed narratives are far harder to fight than outright fabrications. You cannot simply fact-check your way out of a story that contains real facts, real quotes, and real context, just assembled in a way that creates a completely false impression. Academic research confirms the problem: deepfakes that distort rather than fully fabricate are perceived as significantly more credible and harder to rebut.

Most Teams Are Not Ready

The data on preparedness is alarming. Oxford-GlobeScan research found that only 18% of corporate affairs teams globally say they are ready to handle a deepfake or AI-driven misinformation incident. Another 43% say they are not very prepared.

For communications leaders specifically, the gap is even starker. BCG found that 88% of chief communications officers are not fully prepared to lead an AI transformation, and 68% have made little or no progress beyond early pilots. A separate multi-organization study found that communicators rate AI as highly urgent (7.4 out of 10) and valuable (8.1 out of 10), yet their confidence in using AI effectively sits at just 4.2 out of 10.

That gap, between urgency and capability, is exactly the window that threat actors exploit.

Why Asia Is Particularly Exposed

The risk is not evenly distributed. For organizations operating in Asia Pacific, the threat environment is more hostile and the defenses are weaker.

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Close to 60% of APAC companies are already facing deepfake-driven attacks, and half have reported reputational harm from AI-generated misinformation or impersonation campaigns. In India alone, 55% of organizations have experienced reputational damage from AI-generated misinformation. Meanwhile, 71% of APAC organizations now identify AI as their top data security risk, per the Thales 2026 Data Threat Report.

Southeast Asia adds another layer of exposure. The region's 680 million people have a social media penetration rate of 64.3%, creating conditions where influence operations can spread rapidly. Research from the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs has documented how fragmented, reactive responses consistently fail in the face of coordinated narrative attacks.

The scale problem is real. Most communications teams in Asia are still operating reactive playbooks built for a slower information environment. They are not equipped for AI-assisted narrative operations.

Narrative Slack and the Governance Gap

FTI Consulting framed the new reality well: the era of narrative slack is over.

In the past, organizations could sustain small gaps between what they said and what they did. Stakeholders moved slowly, media cycles gave time to respond, and inconsistencies rarely compounded. That is no longer true. Employees, regulators, investors, and activists can now use AI-powered monitoring tools to surface and amplify any contradiction between an organization's stated positions and its observed behavior.

Axios reported in late 2025 that regulators and courts are beginning to treat narrative contradictions, statements that are individually accurate but misleading in aggregate, as actionable governance failures. This is not a communications problem anymore. It is a legal and compliance risk.

For APAC executives, this means that monitoring media coverage and responding to crises as they emerge is no longer sufficient. Organizations need to understand not just what is being said about them, but how those narratives are being assembled, who is amplifying them, and whether their own communications are creating the raw material for misleading framings.

That requires a fundamentally different kind of intelligence.

The Intelligence Shift

Jansen's observation at Entual cuts to the heart of where the industry needs to move: "The reflex is volume: more output, faster, cheaper. But communication does not have a volume shortage; it has a quality problem. Too much of what is produced adds too little."

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The organizations that will navigate this environment are not the ones generating the most content. They are the ones who can see what narratives are forming before those narratives solidify, and who have the systems and judgment to respond with credibility rather than volume.

For Asian communications leaders focused on content production and crisis response, this is a significant strategic shift. The threat is not coming from synthetic video. It is coming from real information, selectively assembled by credible actors, spreading across platforms your team is not monitoring, through channels your tools were not built to track.

The deepfake drill can wait. The harder work starts now.