Sanjeeb Phuyal is the Nepali Editor of Newschecker based in Kathmandu, Nepal. He brings over a decade of experience writing and editing news. In his previous stint, he worked as online editor for The Kathmandu Post. With the growth of social media platforms—and the ever-growing competition amongst media outlets to churn out breaking news, he feels that fact-checking every piece of information has become more essential today than ever before.
Claim
US President Donald Trump Responded To Kathmandu Mayor Balendra Shah.
Fact
Viral video is edited by using AI Generated audio.
A video allegedly showing US President Donald Trump responding to the Facebook post of Kathmandu Metropolitan City (KMC)’s mayor Balendra Shah is going viral on TikTok.
Earlier on February 20, KMC Mayor Balen Shah had posted on his Facebook wall tagging US President Donald Trump. Addressing the US President Shah wrote on his wall “Thank you for making us realize our country is better than yours. We are poor because our people are leaving our country. You are poor because your people cannot build your country; you lazy people need the rest of the world for it. Please stop your lust (DV) slavery as well; we shall get our gems back. Ban the rest of the world from your country, and let the world grow.” Balen’s Facebook post had been widely circulated across social media platforms.
Against this backdrop, TikTok user @karnali.channel55 posted a video with a clip showing the US President responding to KMC Balen Shah. In the video, Trump is heard saying, “Dear Mayor Balen, tremendous message, really fantastic, you are a strong leader and Kathmandu is a beautiful city. Great potential, great people. I love winners and you’ve got that energy. Big energy. America is still the greatest. I respect leaders who wanna build their own nations, strong nations, and strong leadership, just like me. Keep working hard, make Nepal great. Who knows maybe I will visit someday. Huge possibilities.” This video carries a screenshot of Balen’s Facebook post.
This video posted on February 22 has garnered 7462 and 1136 users have shared the video until the last count.
Fact Check /Verification
To check the veracity of the claim made in the viral video, Newschecker conducted several searches on Google by using relevant keywords. However, the searches didn’t find any result resembling the viral video. We also checked the social media pages of President Trump to find if President Trump ever spoke about Kathmandu’s Mayor Balen Shah.
We, then, checked the original audio feature of the TikTok video and found that 203 videos have been created by using the audio so far.
Further, we downloaded the video and uploaded the video in the AI detection tool Hive Moderation which found that 98.3 % of the audio carried in the video is AI generated.
We reached out to our partners at Deepfakes Analysis Unit (DAU), who checked the video through Hiya, a deepfake detection tool. Hiya indicated 65 percent AI manipulation in the audio track used in the video.
Thus, our findings clearly indicated that the purported audio of US President Donald Trump’s response to Kathmandu Mayor Balen Shah is AI Generated.
Conclusion
No, US President Donald Trump didn’t respond to Kathmandu Mayor Balendra Shah after the latter posted on his social media tagging him. The viral audio is AI generated, and thus the viral video is misleading.
Result: Edited
Sources
Donald Trump X
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Sanjeeb Phuyal is the Nepali Editor of Newschecker based in Kathmandu, Nepal. He brings over a decade of experience writing and editing news. In his previous stint, he worked as online editor for The Kathmandu Post. With the growth of social media platforms—and the ever-growing competition amongst media outlets to churn out breaking news, he feels that fact-checking every piece of information has become more essential today than ever before.
