A video shows the Governor of Minnesota and Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz dancing wearing a cowboy hat.
The original video shows clearly that the dancer isn’t Mr Walz. It has likely been edited using Artificial Intelligence to create a deepfake, by imposing Mr Walz’s face onto the dancer’s.
A video which some online are claiming shows the Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz dancing in a cowboy hat and crop top is likely a deepfake created with Artificial Intelligence (AI).
The clip, which has been circulating on X (formerly Twitter), Instagram and Facebook, appears to be of a man in glasses, dancing to a Beyoncé song.
Captions with the video frequently claim it depicts Mr Walz, who is Kamala Harris’s running mate on the Democratic ticket in the upcoming US presidential election.
But these claims are false. The clip has likely been edited using AI to create a ‘deepfake’—video or audio which semi-successfully mimics the face or voice of a public figure.
In this case, what appears to be the head of Mr Walz, the Governor of Minnesota, has been imposed onto the body of another man.
The original video, posted to Instagram in February, clearly shows a different person dancing, who is not wearing glasses.
A clue that the video being shared has been manipulated is its low quality, which may be intended to hide visual glitches. But despite the poor quality, the glasses disappear at several points in the video where the person’s face turns to the side, they look up or the dancer’s hand passes their face—a tell-tale sign of a face-swap deepfake.
We’ve written a guide on how to spot deepfake videos and AI audio which can help you identify content that has been edited or created to mislead online.
This is also not the first time we’ve fact checked a misleading post about Mr Walz, we previously debunked a screenshot of an altered Guardian opinion article about ‘dancing on stage naked’ which had been edited to look at though it was written by the politician.
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 it is not really Tim Walz dancing in the video, his face has been imposed onto another person’s body with AI.
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