Videos claiming that Donald Trump has recently extended his support for the release of Imran Khan from Jail are Deepfakes
Social media is abuzz with two videos (here and here) of the US President-elect Donald Trump saying, “Hello my Pakistani American friends, I promise if I win I will try my best to get Imran Khan out of jail as soon as possible. He is my friend. I love him….” These videos are being shared on social media amidst reports coming in from Pakistan that leaders of PTI, the party founded by Imran Khan, are claiming that Trump will play a role in the release of Khan, who is a former Prime Minister of Pakistan. We fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: Videos of Donald Trump telling the Pakistani Americans that he will try to get Imran Khan out of Jail if he wins in the elections.
Fact: These videos are deepfakes that have been generated using Artificial Intelligence. They were made by manipulating the audio of the original videos in which Trump was speaking about something completely unrelated to Imran Khan. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.
To check the veracity of the viral claim, we first performed a keyword search to check if Trump had made such a statement regarding the release of Imran Khan from jail. However, we did not find any evidence to back this viral claim.
Two different videos have been going viral with the same claim. After closely watching and observing the first one (here, here, and here), we found a few irregularities in how Trump’s lips move while delivering his lines.
The audio also doesn’t seem to be in Sync with the video. These anomalies made us suspect that the video might have been manipulated/edited or generated using AI. To check the same, we ran the video through the AI-generated content detection tool ‘True Media.’ The results show that substantial evidence of manipulation is found in both the voice and face featured in the video (Archive link).
We then ran the same video through the AI content detection tool Hive Moderation. This analysis revealed (Archive link) that the video is 68.2% likely to contain AI or Deep Fake content.
This makes it clear that the viral video is a deepfake video manufactured to make it look like Trump was extending his support to Imran Khan. Furthermore, through a reverse image search, we found the original video clip that was used to create this viral clip.
This video is of an interview (here and here) of Donald Trump with NBC News from May 2017. The viral clip matches with the viral video from the 12:30 timestamp of this interview.
We then shifted our focus to the second viral video, which also shows Trump saying the same lines as in the first video, extending his support to Imran Khan.
Although we did not find the original video clip of Trump seen in the viral video, we found that this video clip is also a Deepfake generated with the help of AI. True Media AI Detection analysis results have shown that the video contains ‘Substantial Evidence of Manipulation’ (Archive link).
All of this evidence makes it clear that the viral videos of Trump showing his support for the release of Imran Khan from jail are Deepfake videos created using AI manipulation tools.
To sum up, Deepfake videos are viral as real videos of Donald Trump supporting the release of Imran Khan from jail.