| A Navy veteran and college educator, Leonard Bell is the only Black candidate for state Senate in New Hampshire. The Senate Republicans used AI to turn him into a laughing caricature buried in cash and gold chains, and paid Meta to show it as many as 50,000 times. “Everything in that photo is false other than my face,” Bell says. |
The New Hampshire Senate Republicans paid Meta to show voters a picture of Leonard Bell as many as 50,000 times last month.
Just one problem: the picture is not real.
Bell, the Democrat running for state Senate in Manchester and Litchfield, is a 20-year Navy veteran and an educator at Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU).
In the ad, he has taken the form of a wealthy gangster: laughing in a leather armchair, buried to the shoulders in cash, with thick gold chains around his neck and an oversized ring and blinged-out watch on his hand.
Those are the props of a specific stereotype.
For decades, movies, television, and music videos have used similar visual shorthand for a Black man portrayed as flashy and dangerous: gold chains, a big ring, a bejeweled, oversized watch, and a big pile of cash.
Bell is the only Black candidate running for state Senate in New Hampshire this year.
“Everything in that photo is false other than my face,” Bell told the Granite Post in an interview.
Meta’s own label on the ad reads “Digitally created.” Under Meta’s rules for political ads, that label means the advertiser told Meta the ad includes a photorealistic image made or changed with artificial intelligence (AI). Meta requires that disclosure when such an image shows, among other things, “a real person as saying or doing something they didn’t say or do.” The ad’s detail page states it plainly: “Media in this ad created or edited with AI.”
The face appears to be lifted from a real photo: a family snapshot taken outdoors at sunset in which Bell, wearing a green button-down shirt and glasses, grins alongside four other people. In the ad, his face has been cut out, turned black-and-white, and dropped into a scene built around it.
The altered image is reproduced with this story so readers can see what voters were shown. It is not a photograph of Bell.
Senate Republicans did not respond to questions about tools to create the ad or the prompt used to create it by time of publication.
What does Bell say is real?
Almost nothing, not even the clothes.
“I don’t even own a plaid coat,” Bell said. “I don’t even wear plaid other than socks.”
Bell went through the jewelry in the ad piece by piece. None of what is depicted in the ad is real.
What he wears, he said, are a wedding band and a graduation ring his father gave him when he finished high school nearly 40 years ago. “One of the diamonds is missing out of the damn thing,” he said. Around his neck, he wears a small cross. “I got a necklace that’s near and dear to my heart. That’s a small one with a cross of my Lord and Savior on it.”
The gold chains in the ad are not his. “No chains,” he said. “I don’t have any ropes and big chains like that. That’s a fabrication.”
Even the glasses were changed, he said. “Those glasses are not the actual glasses that I wear every single day.”
His first reaction, he said, was that the ad showed desperation. “Come on now, you got to be better than that. So that tells me there’s desperation happening, going on the other side.”
Bell spent 20 years in the Navy and works at SNHU. He has seven adult children and several grandchildren who call him Papa. Anyone who knows him, he said, knows the picture is a lie. “There are people that know me know that that depiction of me is as false as false can get.”
The text posted with the image reads: “What is Leonard Bell’s plan for New Hampshire taxpayers? Voters shouldn’t hand a State Senate candidate a blank check without knowing what his agenda could cost. See the record.”
It links to therealleonardbell.com, a site paid for by the New Hampshire Senate Republicans.
The site says, “The only thing we know about Leonard Bell is that he supports a new income tax and higher property taxes.”
It offers no vote, quote or document to back that up. Bell is a first-time candidate, as the site itself notes, and it lists his record as “No Public Record.”
In an Aug. 11 op-ed in the Union Leader, Bell wrote that New Hampshire “ranks dead last in the country in the share of education costs the state actually covers” and that he wants to “lower property taxes to ensure every family in New Hampshire can stay here and thrive.” The op-ed does not mention an income tax.
According to Meta’s Ad Library, where details about Facebook and Instagram ads can be viewed, the ad first ran from Sept. 7 through Sept. 12 on Meta’s platforms. It cost the Senate Republicans between $200 and $299 and drew between 10,000 and 15,000 impressions, all of them in New Hampshire. Meta counts an impression every time an ad shows up on someone’s screen, so one person can be counted more than once.
The image did not go away when that ad ended. On Sept. 14, the Senate Republicans launched a second ad with the same picture, which had drawn another 4,000 to 5,000 impressions by Sept. 16. On Sept. 21, they launched a third, the biggest buy of the three: $900 to $999, and 25,000 to 30,000 impressions as of Oct. 2, when it was still running. Taken together, the three ads have put the altered image on New Hampshire screens between 39,000 and 50,000 times, at a cost of $1,100 to $1,400.
The New Hampshire Senate Republicans have spent $281,647 on Meta ads about politics since 2019, according to the Ad Library, including $3,475 in the week the Bell ad was running.
The same day the Bell ad launched, the Senate Republicans launched matching “too expensive” ads against Rebecca Harned and Carryl Roy, two white Democratic women running for state Senate.
A version aimed at Bobbi Boudman followed on Sept. 14. All three carry Meta’s “Digitally created” label, and all three show the candidates mid-laugh, surrounded by cash.
What changes from ad to ad is what the software put on each candidate. Harned, Roy, and Boudman were given dangling earrings, and Roy a fur collar. Bell was given a stack of gold chains, a large ring, a plaid suit, and a leather chair.
“I got grandkids, man, who look up to me, so I’m not gonna fake who I am as a person ever,” Bell said.
Does the ad break New Hampshire’s deepfake law?
It may.
New Hampshire passed a law in 2024 aimed at fake images, titled “Synthetic Media and Deceptive and Fraudulent Deepfakes.”
Since Aug. 1, 2024, it has been illegal for a committee or anyone else to spread a “deepfake” of a candidate within 90 days of an election, if they knew or should have known it was fake.
The law defines a deepfake broadly: any media in which a person’s “face, body, or voice has been digitally altered” so the person “appears to be doing something that he or she has never done.”
Bell never sat in a leather chair laughing in a pile of cash while wearing gold chains. The New Hampshire Senate Republicans paid for the image, told Meta it was made with AI, and ran it starting Sept. 7, inside the 90-day window before the Nov. 3 election.
The law gives advertisers a way out: print a specific warning in the image itself, in type “no smaller than the largest font size of other text” in the ad. The required wording for an image is: “This image has been manipulated or generated by artificial intelligence technology and depicts speech or conduct that did not occur.”
The Bell ad carries no warning of any kind.
The law also carves out an exception for “satire or parody,” which the Senate Republicans could raise. Nobody believes Bell literally sat in a pile of money, but it would be up to a court to decide whether this ad would be exempted.
The image in question is a photorealistic composite built from his real face. And the committee’s own paperwork also provides relevant evidence. To get Meta’s “Digitally created” tag, the Senate Republicans had to tell Meta the ad contains photorealistic media made or changed with AI, a disclosure Meta requires when such media shows “a real person as saying or doing something they didn’t say or do.”
That description, in their own words, closely tracks the statutory definition of a deepfake. The law then hands anyone who makes such an image a safety net with the printed disclaimer, and they declined it three times.
The deepfake section itself puts enforcement in the candidate’s hands. Bell could go to court to have the ad pulled and sue the sponsor for damages and attorneys’ fees.
But the section sits inside the chapter of state law that governs political advertising, and that chapter gives the attorney general a role.
Under RSA 664:18, any candidate or voter can file a written complaint with the attorney general over a violation of any part of the chapter, and the attorney general can investigate, order the violator to stop, and prosecute.
The chapter’s penalty section makes any other violation a misdemeanor for an individual and a felony for a committee or other organization. Whether a court would apply that general penalty to a section that wrote its own civil remedy has not been tested.
Asked for comment, state Sen. Donovan Fenton, a Democrat who co-sponsored the law, said this kind of ad is what the law was written to stop.
“Just two years after we passed a law making it illegal to use AI deepfakes to smear people in political campaigns, Republicans are weaponizing this technology to make racist caricatures of proud veterans running for office in New Hampshire,” Fenton said. “This is absolutely vile stuff.”
Bell is challenging state Sen. Victoria Sullivan, a first-term Republican who flipped the seat in 2024 by beating longtime Democratic Sen. Donna Soucy, 13,289 votes to 12,541, or 51.4% to 48.5%. District 18 covers Manchester Wards 5 through 9 and Litchfield.
Sullivan has also faced scrutiny over statements and actions involving race.
Just in recent days, Sullivan was found to be a follower of a New Hampshire-based Twitter account that specializes in posting racist slurs and antisemitic memes. When confronted over following the account, Sullivan said “I didn’t realize I was.”
In August 2023, New Hampshire Public Radio (NHPR) reported that a Windham social studies teacher was interrupted in class three times in one day by administrators after a parent complained about a Beyoncé music video she used to connect students with the Harlem Renaissance.
Two days later, Sullivan posted:
“Beyoncé is not exactly wholesome entertainment.
If the teacher wanted to show true black music culture and its origins they should show Gospel music. That was the origins for jazz—the only truly American music form.”
As a candidate for mayor of Manchester in June 2021, Sullivan called the Republican state budget “historic” and said it “delivers for the hard-working families of Manchester.” That budget carried a rider that limited what public school teachers could say about racism and sexism. In May 2024, US District Judge Paul Barbadoro struck the law down, ruling it was so vague it failed to give teachers “fair warning” of what was banned.
The Granite Post has previously reported on Sullivan’s years of attacks on LGBTQ+ Granite Staters, including a 2024 Pride Month post declaring the rainbow was “given to God’s people as a sign of his covenant with us” and that “no group or organization can claim it for themselves. They just can’t.”
Asked if she believed the ad should come down or if she approved the ad before it went live, Sen. Sullivan did not respond by the time of publication.
Bell and Sullivan face each other Nov. 3. As of Sept. 16, the Senate Republicans’ second ad using the altered image of Bell was still active in Meta’s Ad Library.
