Deepfake Video of Joe Biden Viral as His First One After Dropping Out of Race

A video of US President Joe Biden, speaking directly to the camera, has gone viral on social media, where users are sharing it as his first video address after announcing that he would not be contesting as the Democratic Party's candidate for president in the 2024 US Presidential elections.

What does he say?: In the video, Biden's statement is laced with expletives.

• "My fellow Americans, I want to take a moment to address some of the hateful s**t you've been talking about me. Many of you have been saying that I've been suffering from brainworms, or I have applesauce for brains. Well, I won't mince words, so here it is — f**k you, you're all a bunch of f*****s. End of quote. Repeat the line. So enjoy president cackles or president b******, I really don't give two f***s anymore. Biden out."

At the time of writing this report, this post by X user Dave Rubin had gathered 1.24 crore views and was shared by more than 14,000 users.

(Archives of more users sharing this claim can be seen here and here.)

Is it true?: The video is a deepfake.

• The original video, first shared on 15 June, shows Biden addressing Americans after an attempt was made on former US President Donald Trump's life.

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How did we find out the truth?: We noticed that the video carried a watermark of American news organisation PBS News on the bottom-left corner.

• Taking a cue from this, we looked for similar visuals of Biden on their verified YouTube channel.

• This led us to a video of Biden, streamed live on 15 July, titled 'WATCH LIVE: Biden Oval Office address on attempted assassination of Trump'.

• In this video, Biden spoke about the "need for us to lower the temperature in our politics," reminding people that while candidates might disagree, they "are not enemies, we're neighbours, we're friends, coworkers, citizens, and most importantly, fellow Americans."

• He stressed on the need for people to stand together and said that Trump's shooting called on everyone to "take a step back," offering condolences to the family of the victim that was killed.

• Biden then condemned the shooting, stating that "violence has never been the answer." He continued by listing a series of hostile events against government officials, stating that "There is no place for this kind of violence in America, ever."

• One can see that Biden's movements in this video closely resemble the movements in the viral video.

(Note: We have muted the audio in the viral video due to the explicit nature of the speech.)

Biden Deepfake After Dropping Out of Race WQ by Quint Digital Media Limited

It is important to note that this video was streamed on 15 July, whereas Biden announced that he was dropping out of the 2024 Presidential race nearly a week later, on 21 July.

What about the viral video?: We ran a keyword search using some of the words Biden purportedly said in the viral video, but did not find any credible reports or visuals to support the claim that he made any statement of this kind.

• To verify the authencity of the video's elements, we submitted it to TrueMedia, a tool to identify political deepfakes.

• The results it returned said that its tool detected "substantial evidence of manipulation" in the video.

• While it was uncertain whether the audio has been synthesised or cloned, it was confident that Biden's face had been manipulated.

• In this case, that could imply that parts of Biden's mouth had been manipulated to make it appear as if he was saying the words in the viral video.

• ConTrails AI, a Bengaluru-based startup that has its own AI tools for audio and video detection, also went through the video.

• Their analysis on the audio section revealed that Biden's voice was cloned, and that they had detected an "audio spoof with high confidence."

"Just based on the Audio data alone, we can confidently fall it an AI-generated audio (sic)," the report noted.

Conclusion: A deepfake of US President Joe Biden has gone viral with the false claim that he made an expletive-laden speech after announcing that he would drop out of the US Presidential race.

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