A video in which US President Donald Trump appears to tell Prime Minister Keir Starmer to “focus on Britain because the people didn’t elect you to be a commentator, they elected you to be their ruler” is not genuine.
There is no evidence that Trump said this, and the audio in the video was created using artificial intelligence (AI). This is very similar to another AI-generated video of Trump appearing to criticize Starmer’s leadership that was fact-checked earlier this month.
The video has been liked over 3,400 times on Facebook. Mr Trump was quoted as saying: “Starmer, I’m watching from across the Atlantic and I’m telling you this, this is not how leadership should be.”
He is said to have told the Prime Minister to “focus at home, focus on Britain, our streets, our borders, our economy, our energy bills. These are your jobs, not to stand out overseas, not to chase headlines, not to lecture the world.”
There are no credible reports yet that he made any comments on the edited clip.
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Dr Dominic Rees, an associate professor at the University of Reading and an expert in generative AI, previously said that having the same loud looping music track playing in the background “immediately raises suspicions of AI manipulation”.
“This is a common deepfake technique, designed to obscure audio discrepancies that are a key feature of AI,” he explained.
Dr. Leeds said that the previous videos we fact-checked were created using a text-to-speech AI tool, and we strongly suspect that this was also used to create this new video. For example, this audio lacks the pauses that are common in natural audio.
The video begins with a clip of Trump speaking, but his mouth movements do not match the audio.
Full Fact tracked the video to the moment Trump spoke to reporters on January 27 about the investigation into the shooting of Alex Preti by federal agents in Minneapolis.
We matched the clip used at the beginning of the viral video to the moment Trump says, “Everything is going very well. I’m going to Iowa, some of you” instead of “Starmer watching from across the Atlantic, I have to tell you.”
Trump did not mention Starmer in the original video.
We have previously fact-checked numerous other deepfake videos, audio clips, and AI-generated images of Trump. We’ve also created a guide with helpful tips on how to identify AI-generated audio, images, and deepfake videos shared on social media.
