A video of a person singing in Arabic is being widely shared on social media. It claims the person in the video is well-known Soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo. Let’s fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: Cristiano Ronaldo singing an Arabic song after converting to Islam. He is now a Muslim.
Fact: This is a Deep Fake video created and uploaded by a YouTube channel named Monzi (magicofbarca); they make Deep Fakes of footballers like Messi and Ronaldo. Hence the claim made in the post is FALSE.
We made a reverse image search of the screenshots from the video and found a YouTube video similar to the viral post. The only exception being the person featured is not the same as the one from the viral post. We then searched the internet with relevant keywords to investigate more and were led to a YouTube video.
The video is titled ‘Ronaldo praying any top club in Europe signs him this summer [DeepFake]’, and the video has been uploaded by a YouTube Channel named Monzi (magicofbarca). It features the same person from the viral post who is quite similar to Cristiano Ronaldo. As the title of the video says, this is a Deep Fake video (A video in which a person’s face or body is replaced with someone else’s using digital techniques), and the same can be confirmed from the post description which says ‘is fake (and a Joke)’.’The same video is uploaded by ‘magicofbarca’ on their Instagram account, which can be watched here.
The link to the original post is also given in the post-description-The Instagram link to this video can be accessed from here. This was created by an Instagram user named Bewar Abdullah, a doppelganger of Cristiano Ronaldo. He is the same person featured in the first video result we found through Yandex.
The about section of this Youtube channel says, ‘I make deepfakes of footballers like Messi and ronaldo, and also youtubers like KSI and pewdiepie, etc… If you want a deepfake comission done for you, message me on instagram or twitter.’
Further, to know if Cristiano Ronaldo has adopted Islam, we looked for relevant news reports but could not find any. Since he is a celebrity, anything related to him would generally be reported widely in the Media. We found a media report by the Mirror (UK) which says he is a staunch Catholic. The news report can be read here.
With all this evidence, we can conclude that it is not Cristiano Ronaldo who is seen singing in the video from the viral post.
To sum up, a Deep Fake video of Cristiano Ronaldo Singing in Arabic is shared as real, claiming him as a Muslim.
