A video featuring Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is being shared on social media with the claim that Australia has cancelled visas of all Pakistani nationals following a terror attack at Bondi Beach. The clip shows Albanese apparently announcing the decision. In the video, he can be seen saying, ‘The Pakistani-origin terrorist Naveed Akram has been arrested in today’s terror attack. Australia is suspending all visa services for Pakistani(s), effective immediately.’ We will fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: Video of the Australian Prime Minister announced the cancellation of all Pakistani visas after the Bondi Beach terror attack.
Fact: The viral video is an AI-generated deepfake. The audio has been generated using artificial intelligence and does not reflect any real statement made by Anthony Albanese. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.
To verify the claim, we conducted an internet search with relevant keywords to determine whether Anthony Albanese had made such an announcement following the Bondi Beach attack. This search did not yield any credible news reports that validate the claim. We also found that he did not make such statements in the press conference following the attack (here and here). However, we found news reports stating that one of the alleged attackers, Naveed Akram, was arrested and taken to the hospital (here, here, and here).
Further, to learn more about the video, we extracted keyframes from it and conducted a reverse image search. This led us to media reports from 2022 featuring photographs that closely match the visuals seen in the viral clip (here, here, and here). One such report was published by the Sydney Morning Herald on 3 August 2022, which covered a parliamentary discussion on the proposed Indigenous Voice to Parliament. The photograph accompanying the report matches the background, his costume, and the posture seen in the viral video.
Further, we closely examined the viral video and noticed inconsistencies between Albanese’s lip movements and the accompanying audio. The voice also sounded unnatural, raising suspicion that the clip may have been generated using AI tools.
To verify the authenticity of the video, we analysed the video using Hiya’s Deepfake Audio Detector, which indicated that the voice track was AI-generated. This establishes that this is a deepfake video and not real footage.
We further ran this video on Hive, an AI content detection tool, which identified the video as AI-generated or Deepfake, with an aggregate score of 68.3%.
To sum up, this video of Australian PM Anthony Albanese announcing that Australia has suspended all visa services to Pakistanis is a Deepfake.
