Yunusa Umar
A video footage posted on TikTok claims to show former US president and 2024 Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump advising President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to reverse fuel subsidy removal and other policies to benefit Nigerians. This video follows a similar pattern with recent videos from Tik-Tok, fact checked by NV-A and all with claims of the presidential candidate speaking to Nigerians.
The video posted by @Breakingnews24_365 showed an image of Tinubu and Trump imposed inside a video frame where Trump was talking about how policies by the Tinubu’s administration were impacting on Nigerians.
According to the video, Trump said, “Nigerian situation. People are in destitute poverty. People are suffering from the bad government. I’m advising President Bola Ahmad Tinubu to reapply subsidies on petroleum products, health, and food items tremendously, and abolish IMF and World Bank policies.”
As of the time this report was published, the claim had generated about 4,600 reactions, 154 comments and over 2,000 shares. Also some users commented differently under the post. @Franklin Nwosu commented with a caption, “But if he does it, no more loans from world bank and IMF”. “Thank you sir for your favour over Nigerians country, may God give you most powerful to do it so”, User8548103610472 also commented.
Dahiru Mohammed commented with “Thanks very much for the announcement”. While Hajiyakarama said, “Thank you sir because you say the truth.” Another TikTok user, Mohammededgaji868 posted, “THANKYOU, SIR”. TE BLINK1 reacted with a caption, “Your victory is sure.”
The statement attributed to Trump is coming at the time when Nigerians are protesting to end bad governance in Nigeria and considering that the World Bank approved a $2.25 billion loan request for Nigeria in June. These two occurrences have made it imperative to fact-check if Trump had made related commentary or what prompted him to make the said statement.
VERIFICATION
NV-A conducted a keyboard search on Donald Trump, Tinubu and reversing of petrol subsidy including abolishing of IMF and World Bank policies but no media outlet reported any news relating to such remarks made by former President Trump.
The video footage was also subjected to Deepware.ai, an AI application that scans and detects deep fake videos to determine whether it is manipulated or not.
The result of Deepware analysis indicated that the footage is doctored. Also, a lip-reading assessment showed that there is misalignment between audio and mouth movement of Trump, which indicates that the footage was manipulated.
The researcher took a keyframe from the video and subjected it to Yandex reverse image search. The result revealed a list of images which were further analysed by matching the tie colour worn in the doctored video and the flag colours identified in the video background to track the originating video.
Exact matches to the keyframe analysis was an Instagram video showing Trump announcing his endorsement for a construction company. On further inspection, elements from the Instagram video is similar to the video from an earlier fact-check investigating the claim that Trump said he is set to visit Nigeria. The findings from that report showed that the videos were generated using TryParrotAI.com. The AI platform has only this template of Trump wearing a blue striped tie with the flag behind him, which has been used multiple times to generate videos of him talking about P. Diddy, Marjorie Taylor Greene, his boats and other topics.
CONCLUSION
The claim that Trump advised President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to reapply fuel subsidy and forgo all IMF and World Bank policies is MISLEADING as findings show that the video is an Al-generated content.
