A 17-second video which purportedly shows the President-elect of the United States of America, Donald J. Trump, announcing Engr. Mustafa Bello, a former minister of commerce to join his team and take charge of budget planning, has been circulating on Whatsapp since the U.S. presidential election.
The claim was shared on a WhatsApp group where a NV-A staff is a member and from the screenshot below showed that it is a forwarded message.
The caption on WhatsApp forwarded message reads, “Engr. Mustafa Bello of Kontagora invited by Trump to join him in planning his budgets on his return to the white house”.
In the video, Trump said “I have today invited an accomplished former Nigerian Minister of Commerce to join my team. Engineer Mustafa Bello will take charge of all American budget planning on my second presidency. He will help make America great again.”
Last week, Trump was re-elected as the 47th president of the United States and the claim that he appointed a former Nigerian minister, Mustafa Bello has been forwarded many times on WhatsApp and made it to Facebook, here.
VERIFICATION
The video was downloaded and put through DeepwareAI, search results showed ‘NO DEEPFAKE DETECTED’. But, a closer look at the video revealed that the video is not in sync with the voiceover.
Then, the researcher took a screenshot from the clip and ran it through Google Lens, the results show that the original video was a 13 minutes and 16 seconds interview with NBC News by Lester Holt on May 12, 2017, where the U.S. President revealed that he was preparing to fire FBI Director James Comey regardless of recommendations from the attorney general and deputy attorney general.
On comparing the WhatsApp video with the NBC interview clip, we found that the watermark of ‘NBC News Exclusive’ on the top right corner has been replaced with another one that reads, ‘made with TryParrotAI.com’ on the top left and bottom right corner in the 17 seconds WhatsApp forwarded video.
A further search revealed that similar clips with the ‘made with TryParrotAI.com’ have been shared by other users across various social media platforms like YouTube, X, LinkedIn, and TikTok.
Also, the fact-checker used the TryParrotAI platform to create a video of text-to-speech about News Verifier Africa being a reliable platform and it was evident that the announcement of Mustafa Bello was a deepfake generated on the TryParrotAI website, utilising AI-driven voice and visual manipulation to simulate Trump’s announcement.
An advanced keyword search on ‘Mustafa Bello and Trump’ did not bring any related information and also no verified Nigerian media platform has reported the news on Bello’s purported appointment.
CONCLUSION
The claim that Bello was appointed by Trump to head the United States’ budget and planning team is FASE, NV-A found out that the forwarded WhatsApp video is Al-generated.
Priscilla Olowoyotan
