Video of man waving machete on small boat isn’t real

A video that appears to show a man in a small boat wielding a machete and throwing documents into the sea has been shared thousands of times online, including by the leader of the London Assembly Conservatives, Susan Hall.

But it isn’t real and has been edited with artificial intelligence (AI).

The clip, circulating on Facebook, Instagram and X, has been shared with captions such as “Illegal boat migrants brag ‘this is the end of England’ just before landing on English shores from France with a giant knife”.

GB News posted a video of what looks like the same man, but without the machete, on 30 June, claiming the video showed “small boat migrants” throwing their passports into the English Channel and shouting “this is the end of England”. We have not verified the footage posted by GB News.

The version with the machete, however, is fake. The first version we could find online was posted on 1 July. While the man at the beginning of the clip looks very similar to the man in the video posted by GB News, there are a few clues the machete version isn’t real.

In the GB News video the man is wearing a top with a clear Aztec pattern on the arm and shoulder throughout. However in the clip with the machete, the patterned material near the man’s shoulders appears to be puffed out, while the rest of the shirt sleeves are plain black with no pattern.

At around three seconds into the fake version, as the man turns to throw his documents, the machete briefly disappears and the man has both hands free. The machete then suddenly reappears in his hand. These kinds of glitches are common in videos generated with AI.

Dr Siwei Lyu, an expert in digital media forensics at University at Buffalo, State University of New York in the US, also told us the footage with the machete “is an AI-generated video, likely created by the frame from the original source video through an image-to-video generator”.

He said: “This conclusion is supported by high probability scores from automated AI detection tools and key visual artifacts, including fused fingers, an unnaturally morphing machete, abruptly disappearing papers, and a floating background object.”

We contacted Ms Hall about her post sharing the fake video, which has since been deleted. At the time of writing she had not replied but told the Standard “I didn't recognise that as AI. Ages after it was done someone said it might be, so I deleted it.”

Before engaging with content like this that you come across online, it’s important to consider whether it comes from a trustworthy and verifiable source. Our misinformation toolkit contains tips on how to do this, as does our guide to spotting AI fakes.