A doctored 28-second video clip showing Donald Trump, the United States President, saying he would remove Bola Tinubu, the Nigerian President, for sharing religious affiliation with Vice President Kashim Shettima and failing to curb Boko Haram terrorists has fetched influencer VeryDarkMan (VDM) over 2.5 million views on TikTok.
It is one of the more viral pieces of disinformation shared since Trump threatened military action in Nigeria on Saturday.
In the video, Trump queries Tinubu and Shettima’s similar Islamic religion then gives an ultimatum of 72 hours for the Nigerian President to “fix this issue” or be removed from office.
“I’m sending the US military to Nigeria for a peacekeeping mission. How can the President and Vice President of Nigeria be Muslims? I would be giving Bola Ahmed Tinubu just 72 hours to fix this issue, or I will destroy Boko Haram, and I will remove Tinubu as Nigerian President. Enough is enough,” Trump says in the video.
The clip has garnered great engagement with over 2.5 million views, 140,000 likes, 3,100 comments and 9,500 shares as of Monday afternoon.
TikTok user Pentecost commented on the post, “If America likes, let them take all of our mineral resources and give us security after all, we are not getting anything from the government. It is our politicians who are enjoying all the resources.”
Sunday Michael wrote, “President Trump, Pls do it for us. I will forever be grateful to you if you do this thing you are saying,” while some other user could discern its unauthenticity.
Given its virality and potential to mislead, FIJ subjected the footage to checks.
VERIFICATION
Through a manual analysis of the footage, FIJ discovered that the movement of Trump’s mouth in the clip was not synchronised with the audio.
When FIJ ran the video through Deepware, a video analysis tool, it detected 38 per cent of deepfake content.
A search for the clip from VeryDarkMan‘s page, using screenshots on TinEye, produced no result.
The FactCheckHub recently cautioned that AI tools would be exploited to generate hyper-realistic, deepfakes, manipulated images and fabricated audio capable of misleading many Nigerians due to low digital literacy, leading to widespread mistrust and confusion.
CONCLUSION
FIJ can confirm that the TikTok video is AI-generated and the words featured in it are not Trump’s.
