A viral video claiming US President Donald Trump supported India's actions against Pakistan and vowed to 'destroy the country', following the terrorist attack in Pahalgam, Kashmir is fake and manipulated using artificial intelligence.
BOOM found that the video has been manipulated with voice-cloned audio of Trump overlaid on footage from a 2016 event.
The video is being circulated in the context of recent tensions between India and Pakistan following the Baisaran meadows attack in Pahalgam, which lead to the death of 28 civilians.
In the viral video, Trump appears to be saying, "If Pakistan attacks India, I will not sit back, I will destroy Pakistan. Modi is my friend and I love the people of India."
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BOOM also received the video with the same claim on its WhatsApp helpline number.
Fact Check
Taking cue from the viral video, BOOM did a reverse image search on key frames, which led us to the original footage of Donald Trump speaking at the Economic Club of New York on September 16, 2016, in the run-up to the 2016 US Presidential Elections.
The complete video was streamed by several media outlets including CNN. In this video, Trump can be heard talking of his plans to boost the US economy.
BOOM accessed a complete transcript of Trump's speech from the event and listened to his interactions with the attendees, and could not find a single mention of India or Pakistan.
These inconsistencies indicated the potential use of AI to manipulate the viral clip. Taking cue from this, we extracted the audio, and ran it through a voice clone detection model using the Deepfake-o-meter tool by the University at Buffalo's Media Forensics Lab.
Most of the voice clone detection models indicated a very high likelihood of the audio being a voice clone.
BOOM also consulted with our partners at the Deepfakes Analysis Unit, who ran the audio through Hive Moderator's AI audio detection tool. DAU found the tool providing a high likelihood of being AI-generated. DAU further added that due to the short duration of the clips, some of the detection models had trouble analysing the AI elements in the video.
However, most of the audio detection models that were tried provided significant possibility of AI being used to manipulate the viral clip.
Furthermore, we looked for recent statements of Trump in the aftermath of the Pahalgam attack, and found that he has described the act as "despicable" and expressed support for India's counter-terrorism measures. However, on the current tensions between India and Pakistan, he has taken a more diplomatic stance calling for the peaceful resolution of the conflict over Kashmir, and erroneously stating that the conflict has been "going on for 1,500 years."
