What was claimed
A video shows Donald Trump speaking about the India-Pakistan conflict, in which he claims that India has violated the ceasefire with a drone attack on Pakistani civilians.
Our verdict
This video has been fabricated. It is an old clip of the US President from 2020, which has been altered using artificial intelligence (AI) to create a deepfake.
A video which appears to show President Donald Trump saying that India violated the ceasefire with Pakistan is a deepfake.
The clip has been viewed more than 344,000 times on Facebook and text on the video says “Breaking News” and “This is not a trump speaking this is Pakistan power speaking [sic].” We’re not sure what this means, but the caption on the post gives no suggestion that the video is a deepfake.
In the footage, President Trump appears to say: “India, do you really want to start a war?”
A voice that sounds like President Trump’s, but with an odd cadence, says that India violated the ceasefire with Pakistan with a drone attack on civilians, and warns against an escalation into a nuclear conflict between the countries and involving Russia.
But we’ve seen no evidence President Trump ever made these remarks, and this video is a deepfake.
Full Fact found that the clip uses older footage of President Trump which has been altered with artificial intelligence (AI) to change his words.
The deepfake appears to have used a news conference held at the White House in September 2020 as its basis, before changing the audio and lip-syncing the clip to make it seem like he was talking about something else.
Associate Professor from the University of Reading and expert in generative AI, Dr Dominic Lees, also told us that there were several clues the video had been altered with AI.
He said the video was “clearly a deepfake, with tell-tale audio and visual characteristics that demonstrate that an original video of the President has been manipulated.
“Two techniques have been used: the partial morphing of the lower part of Trump’s face and voice cloning. The deepfaker first used a simple technique of training a voice cloning tool with samples of Trump’s voice, then typed into a ‘text-to-speech’ feature that generates the fake sentences that Trump appears to say.
“This ‘TTS’ is incapable of correctly rendering the cadences of human speech, especially emotion, and we can hear such errors in this deepfake video.
“The deepfaker then applied a lip-syncing GenAI tool, which also has the features of a manipulated video: blurring of the lips, no detail in the mouth area. Almost every deepfake of this sort includes a music track in the background, used to hide the poor quality of the voice clone.”
There have been no credible reports of President Trump making the comments in the clip. Both India and Pakistan did accuse each other of violations of the ceasefire in the aftermath of its signing.
We have previously fact checked a number of other deepfake videos, audio clips and AI-altered images of President Trump, and debunked other misinformation circulating online about the India-Pakistan conflict. We’ve also produced guides with helpful tips on how to spot AI-generated images, and deepfake videos being shared on social media.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as altered because the video has been altered to create a deepfake.
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