Lighthouse Journalism came across a video of Donald Trump being widely shared on social networking platforms. In the video he is heard saying, “Hello my Pakistani American friends, if I win I will try my best to get Imran Khan out of jail as soon as possible. He is my friend. I love him. I will support him to take over the government again and rock and we will work together to make our ties stronger.”
During the investigation we found that the audio on this compilation of pictures is a deepfake and the viral claim is false.
Claim:
X user @SeherUjala shared the viral video on their X handle.
Other users too are sharing the video with the same claim.
The deepfake audio was also shared in March this year.
Investigation:
We did not find any news reports about US President elect Donald Trump’s same statements on Imran Khan.
We also found a news report on foreignpolicy.com that stated: Supporters of Imran Khan, the imprisoned former Pakistani prime minister, likely hoped that Trump would find the time to post something bringing attention to Khan’s plight.
This led us to believe that the video could have been made using a deepfake audio.
We started the fact check by downloading the video and converting it to audio to run it through several AI detection tools.
We ran the audio through the Audio tool in the InVid advanced tools. Hiya.com considered that the audio submitted was likely AI-generated. The technique it suggested was voice cloning.
We then ran the audio file through Hive Moderation, which also suggested that the audio is AI generated.
Conclusion: Donald Trump did not promise to free former Pakistan PM, Imran Khan. Viral audio clip and video is AI generated using voice cloning technique. Viral claim is false.
