Deepfakes are being used to personalize political messages in India, here’s a fun article on it which also points out an instance all the way back from 2020: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/2/20/deepfake-democracy-behind-the-ai-trickery-shaping-indias-2024-elections
It also mentions using deepfakes to target constituencies speaking different languages, to defame opposing parties, and even creating deepfakes to cast doubt on legitimate videos:
Ahead of the state election in November, the caller requested that Jadoun alter a problematic but authentic video of their candidate – whose party he did not disclose – to make a realistic deepfake. The aim: to claim that the original was a deepfake, and the deepfake the original.
If posts were signed, it wont matter what instance youre posting from since your identity would be tied to your public key and not the account on a Mastodon/lemmy/etc server.
Thats more decentralized. It helps when you get banned, a server shuts down etc.