The 2024 election cycle in nearly 50 countries was widely feared to be a watershed moment when artificial intelligence fundamentally changed the disinformation battlefield as deepfake videos, AI-generated propaganda, and hyper-personalized bot campaigns disrupted political systems at an unprecedented scale.The fear was not unfounded ? hyper-realistic synthetic voices impersonating world leaders, AI-generated news websites seamlessly blending fabricated stories into the media ecosystem, and deepf