A viral quote card claims Palace press officer Claire Castro suggested that former Bicol Ako Party List Rep. Zaldy Co’s first video statement — where he accused President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and ex-House Speaker Martin Romualdez of ordering him to insert P100 billion worth of projects into the 2025 national budget — may have been produced by artificial intelligence. This is fake.
Castro did not make such an assertion nor did Philstar.com publish the news card in its official social media pages.
Published by an FB page on Nov. 14, the graphic appeared similar to Philstar.com’s branding and layout. It had the publication’s logo and the supposed statement attributed to Castro that read:
“Iveverify muna natin sa [National Bureau of Investigation] yun video dahil maaaring AI lamang iyon. impossible na si zaldy co iyon.
(Let’s have the NBI verify the video first because it might just be AI. It’s impossible that it would be Zaldy Co.)”
During a Nov. 14 press conference, hours after Co uploaded his nearly six-minute video statement, Castro described his allegations as “baseless and without evidence.” She dared the embattled former party list representative to return to the Philippines and testify under oath.
Castro made no remarks during the media briefing about verifying the authenticity of Co’s “tell-all” video, nor did she imply that it may have been AI-generated, contrary to the circulating claim online.
One noticeable red flag in the fake FB post is its time of publication. The page posted the bogus news card at 3:44 p.m., even before Castro issued the Palace’s official statement refuting Co’s bombshell accusations during the press conference which was livestreamed at 4:49 p.m. on the same day.
A reverse image search traced back to the original social media card published by Philstar.com on Aug. 12, bearing Castro’s remark on a different issue. The original used a photo of Castro in a gray patterned outfit from a May 2 Malacañang press briefing, different from the navy blue jacket with the embroidered Presidential Communications Office logo she wore on Nov. 14.
Another tell-tale sign is the text alignment. In the authentic graphic, the text is left-aligned but the edited version is centered. A closer inspection also showed that the fake quote card has a different font style from the one typically used by the publication.
In a Nov. 15 advisory, Philstar.com disowned the quote card, noting that “the layout, caption and claims shown in the post are fabricated and do not reflect any report or content produced” by the publication.
The fake quote card surfaced on the same day Co uploaded the first part of his tell-all video series on his official FB page where he claimed that the Marcos administration is “using the entire country’s resources to silence me.” He said he is afraid to come home from where he is staying abroad since the corruption scandal involving alleged anomalous flood control projects in the country.
VERA Files has previously debunked another bogus quote card related to Castro.
Posted by FB page Boss Dada (created on Oct. 12, 2024), the viral fake news card has so far garnered over 76,000 reactions, 12,400 comments and 22,000 shares. Other pages have republished the bogus graphic, while some modified it into a different layout.
