A Facebook reel shows the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr. supposedly criticizing his son, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., for his purported inability to understand the suffering of poor people.
This is fake. There are no records of Marcos Sr. making such a remark. The clip was manipulated using artificial intelligence (AI).
Marcos Jr. was 28 years old and serving as governor of Ilocos Norte when his father was ousted by the non-violent People Power Revolution in 1986. Marcos Sr. died in 1989 while in exile in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Uploaded on May 22, the reel showed an animated photo of Marcos Sr. beside a still photo of his son. The elder Marcos was saying:
“Itong si Bongbong ito ang taong walang dinaanang hirap sa buhay. Lahat ng kanyang mga kaibigan anak ng mga elite, mayayaman. Eh, papaano niya maiintindihan ang problema ng mahihirap katulad niyo?
(Bongbong [Marcos] is someone who has not experienced any hardship in life. All his friends are children of the elite, rich people. How could he understand the problems of poor people like you)?”
According to the Deepfakes Analysis Unit (DAU) of the India-based Misinformation Combat Alliance, which verifies misleading audio and video content produced through AI, the reel showed signs of AI-tampering or manipulation.
Using the AI-detection tool HiveAI, the DAU found that the clip of Marcos Sr. “bore signs of AI tampering” around the 0:04 to 0:06 mark. They also found the 0:08 to 0:12 seconds of the reel to “have high scores for deepfake.”
Using the same tool, the DAU discovered that the still image of Marcos Jr. also bore signs of AI tampering.
The DAU pointed out that Marcos Sr.’s clip exhibited signs of being not real even by looking at the video with naked eyes. They said:
“The way it moves while speaking resembles an animated head with extremely uncanny eye movements, coupled with lip movements that seem ‘floaty,’ especially when its alignment with the overlain audio track is analysed… The face appears like a puppet; moving like an animatronic due to its poor lip sync and associated facial gestures.”
VERA Files Fact Check ran the video through reverse image search and found that the late dictator’s talking head was an animated version of his photo originally taken by Agence France-Presse in 1985.
Although he was not wearing glasses in the 1985 image, it shows him wearing the same clothes with creases on the chest area, similar to the one in the video.
The DAU also analyzed the audio used in the reel but got mixed results. One tool called Deepfake-o-meter showed it is synthetic based on four out of six audio classifiers, while HiveAI and another tool called HiyaAI found the audio was not AI-generated.
According to the DAU, the varied results from the tools could be due to two reasons: the audio was too short to get a proper analysis, or it could be due to background noise.
Uploaded by FB page KUYA DWIEN TV, the fake reel has so far received 1.5 million views and 20,600 interactions.
