2024-03-05 16:03:59
A deceptive way to target the black electorate. For several weeks, photos of Donald Trump appearing all smiles surrounded by black people also displaying a broad smile have multiplied on social networks.
If Donald Trump does not hide his desire to court this electorate which played such an important role in Joe Biden’s victory in 2020, the BBC carried out an investigation and discovered that these dozens of photos are “deepfakes”, namely fake photos generated by artificial intelligence (AI).
The co-founder of “Black Voters Matter,” an association that encourages black people to vote, said these deepfakes are “strategic speech” intended to show that the Republican candidate is popular with the black community.
Missing fingers in photos
Found by the BCC, radio presenter Mark Kaye, one of the creators of one of these misleading images, recognizes that these images are fabricated. With his team, they created an image (Editor’s note, on the left in the tweet below) of the smiling former president hugging a group of black women during the Christmas holidays. A photo shared on the presenter’s Facebook account with more than a million followers, but also in an article on black voters supporting Donald Trump, suggesting that these are real voters of the billionaire.
If at first glance we may believe that these photos are real, we can see by looking a little closer that the “people” appearing in the photo are missing fingers from their hands, a revealing sign of created images by AI when we know that generative AIs have difficulty drawing hands.
This does not seem to pose a problem for the conservative presenter who justifies himself to the BBC by indicating that he is “not there to take photos of what is really happening. » “I’m not claiming that’s correct. I’m not saying: Look, Donald Trump was at this party with all these African-American voters. Look how much they love it! “, did he declare.
No proven link with Trump teams
However, these images are indeed created with the aim of deceiving a potential electorate and influencing their vote. In the comments posted on Facebook under Mark Kaye’s publication, we can see that many Internet users believe in the veracity of the photo.
Another image (Editor’s note, on the right in the tweet above) created by an AI widely consulted and analyzed by the BBC, shows the 45th president in the history of the United States posing with black voters on a porch Of house. Originally posted by a satirical account, the photo gained attention when it was reposted with a new caption falsely claiming that Trump stopped his motorcade to meet with these people.
Shaggy, the pro-Trump activist from Michigan behind the post, decided to block BBC X when he was questioned by the outlet about the deepfake. If these images were shared by supporters of Donald Trump, there is nothing to confirm that this operation was carried out by the Republican candidate’s campaign teams, the BBC would like to point out.
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