AI-generated video of Manchester protest shared on social media

25 September 2026

A Facebook video that appears to show a large crowd of people gathered at a protest in Manchester is AI-generated.

Many of the attendees seem to be holding up England flags, and it looks like there’s a police presence on the outskirts of the demonstration. The post is captioned “Do you stand with this massive crowd?”.

When Full Fact ran the video through Google’s AI detector, it told us that the content contained an invisible SynthID watermark which identifies material that was made or edited with Google’s AI tools.

The clip includes several visual glitches that indicate the video isn’t real. Some of the supposed protestors materialise out of thin air, while other figures appear distorted or disappear into other people in the crowd.

Our guide to spotting AI content and misinformation toolkit can help verify what you’re looking at before you share it with others.

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