Artificial Intelligence and Image Manipulation in social media: A TCCM-Based Review of Privacy Implications

Background Artificial intelligence has increased the creation and alteration of visual content on social media. This has raised concerns related to Deepfakes, Synthetic media, Fake images, Identity misuse, Consent violation, Reputational harm, and Digital privacy. Existing research gives greater attention to detection, verification, machine learning models, and digital forensics, while privacy related concerns remain less visible in the keyword structure and citation pattern. Methods This study used bibliometric analysis and the TCCM framework to review Scopus-indexed literature on artificial intelligence and image manipulation in social media. Data were extracted from Scopus on 25 March 2026. The final cleaned dataset included 195 documents published between 2019 and 2026. Biblioshiny and VOSviewer were used to analyse publication growth, publication sources, affiliations, countries, cited documents, keywords, topic trends, co-occurrence patterns, and clusters. The TCCM framework was applied to classify the literature according to theory, context, characteristics, and methodology. Results The results show rising publication activity after 2022, with the highest output in 2025. The literature is mainly connected with computer science, engineering, conference proceedings, imaging science, and applied research outlets. Keyword and cluster results show a strong concentration around social media, deep learning, Deepfake, Artificial intelligence, Deepfake detection, machine learning, digital forensics, cybersecurity, misinformation, authentication, and synthetic media. Conclusion The study shows that research on artificial intelligence and image manipulation in social media is mainly detection-centred. Privacy implications are present through related concerns such as face recognition, identity misuse, authentication, misinformation, digital authenticity and cybersecurity. However, privacy is not yet a dominant research focus. Future research should give greater attention to consent violation, image misuse, reputational harm, victim protection, legal safeguards, and platform accountability.