Amid the growing tensions in the Middle East, Filipino netizens published on Facebook a video of United States President Donald Trump supposedly blaming Israel for the deaths in Gaza. This is fake.
In the videos posted on June 21, Trump could be heard saying:
“Israel, listen carefully. You are responsible for over 55,000 people’s getting wiped out in Gaza and now you are talking about peace? You must be joking. This is not a comedy show. This is real life. The world is watching, and guess what? They are not buying your story anymore.”
The caption of one of the FB posts read:
“Trump, nagsalita na! About Israel…” (Trump finally spoke about Israel…)
This is fake. There is no official record of Trump making such a statement. The voice heard in the video is highly likely to have been generated using artificial intelligence.
VERA Files Fact Check ran the viral video through the AI-detection tool Hive Moderation and the results showed that its audio is 99% likely to be AI-generated.
A reverse image search showed a similar template being used in other AI-generated “motivational speech” videos of the U.S. president and, in the contents of a TikTok user, named “trumpaivoice.”
Further cursory online search revealed that the clip of Trump used in the first few seconds of the video was taken from his debate with Hillary Clinton during the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. It was not from any of his recent public speeches.
The spurious videos surfaced amid the conflict between Israel and Iran. It is continuously gaining traction after Trump announced that U.S. forces bombed three Iranian nuclear sites, thereby joining Israel’s military campaign against its major rival.
Posted by FB users, the video has so far garnered around 51,800 reactions, 2,154 comments and 8,200 shares.
