For a President who spends as much time on social media as Donald Trump, it was perhaps only a matter of time before he was fooled by one of the many viral AI videos about his war in Iran.
The US President admitted last week that he had been fooled by a video apparently showing a US aircraft carrier on fire, and had to call one of his generals to find out what was going on.
The one-month-old war against Iran has been met by a wave of AI-generated videos on social media, some clearly fake, but others fuelling a disinformation campaign, claiming to show actions on the battlefield, including videos of downed US B-2 bombers and captured American troops.
Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, chair in cognitive psychology at the University of Bristol, said the war had produced what the New York Times called a “cascade of AI fakes”, at a scale not seen before, with a majority of AI-generated video promoting pro-Iranian narratives.
“The problem is that the production barrier has been eroded. What once required state-level resources can now be done cheaply by almost anyone, and platforms have in several cases reduced content moderation at exactly the moment the threat is accelerating”, he told The i Paper.
The social media platform X announced this month that it would temporarily suspend creators monetising content if they posted AI-generated videos of armed conflict without a label. However, that has not stopped the surge in misleading content across X, as well as other platforms including Instagram, TikTok and Facebook.
Trump himself has a history of endorsing and believing fake news, including claims that he won the 2020 election, which he lost. He also has a track record of posting AI-generated content on his platform, Truth Social, with one expert telling The i Paper the President “very much lives in that chaotic and hoax-laden world”.
Abraham Lincoln ablaze
Trump has accused Iran of using AI to fabricate the footage of the American aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln on fire.
Trump said the video showed “one of the great ships in the world on fire. They showed it on fire.” Speaking at the Trump-Kennedy Centre, he said: “I called the general, ‘General, what’s with the Abraham Lincoln? It looks like it’s burning down.’
He then quoted the general as staying: “No, it’s not burning down. Not a bullet was ever fired at it, sir.”
He added: “This is my first glimpse of AI and what they’ve done with it. They showed buildings in Tel Aviv burning to the ground, high rises burning. They showed buildings in Qatar. They showed buildings in Saudi Arabia burning, and they weren’t burning. They weren’t hit. It was all AI, AI-based. Terrible.”
He blamed Iran, adding: “They are a country that, for years, I didn’t know this until recently, they’re a country based on disinformation. And now they’re using disinformation plus AI. And that’s a terrible situation.”
Propaganda AI memes and videos are being heavily pushed online to a global audience by the Iranian regime and supporters, with state media broadcasting footage purporting to show massive strikes on enemy targets, which experts say is often fabricated.
Professor Lewandowsky said the incident was potentially alarming. “This is not merely a story about Trump’s credulity; it is a story about how vivid, emotionally compelling AI-generated content bypasses critical reasoning universally,” he said. “In this case, however, the consequences are potentially alarming: when a head of state briefly bases military anxiety on a deepfake, we have a problem.”
Taylor Swift endorsement
In the run-up to his second presidential election, Trump sounded delighted to reveal he had the backing of the US pop sensation Taylor Swift.
He posted images on his social media in August 2024 of the singer and her fans supporting him, with the caption “I accept!” One photo shared by Trump depicted Swift fans wearing T-shirts that read: “Swifties for Trump”.
However, these images were AI-generated. Whether Trump knew this before sharing them remains unclear.
However, a month later, the singer took to social media to give her endorsement to Trump’s opponent, the then-vice-president Kamala Harris.
She wrote on Instagram: “Like many of you, I watched the debate tonight. I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 Presidential Election. I’m voting for @kamalaharris because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them.”
Immigrants eating pets
Opting for shock tactics during a televised presidential debate on US broadcaster ABC, Trump repeated a viral conspiracy theory that illegal immigrants from Haiti were eating domestic pets in the city of Springfield in Ohio.
He said: “In Springfield, they are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating – they are eating the pets of the people that live there.”
City officials discredited the claim, saying there were “no credible reports” that this had occurred.
Trump dug in, however, claiming that he had seen TV interviews of people who said their dogs had been taken and used for food.
The conspiracy theory appears to have come from a variety of social media sources, including a Facebook post about crime in Springfield, which claimed Haitian immigrants killed a cat. A fake recording of a call to police in Springfield reporting a sighting of four Haitians carrying four geese also went viral.
Celebrities in Ukraine
Last year, a month after Trump’s inauguration, a video went viral claiming that the US government’s main overseas aid agency had paid Hollywood celebrities millions of dollars to visit Ukraine.
The clip, which appeared as an E! News video, claimed that actors including Angelina Jolie, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Ben Stiller were flown out to Kyiv to support Ukraine’s war effort and meet president Zelensky, funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID),
It reached millions of users and was shared by both Trump and his then-adviser Elon Musk on X, whose Department of Government Efficiency initiative was responsible for gutting the USAID.
However, E! News told Reuters the video was not authentic and did not come from them. The celebrities named also debunked the claim.
The misinformation tracker NewsGuard said the video had emanated from a pro-Russian propaganda group which spreads disinformation by spoofing reputable news organisations and agencies.
White genocide in South Africa
Trump prompted outrage last year when he ambushed the South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, in the Oval Office with a selection of videos and articles doing the rounds on social media that claimed a “white genocide” was taking place in the country.
The US President claimed that white farmers were being mass murdered in South Africa, a false claim that has been circulating in corners of the internet for years, which is linked to the racist conspiracy myth of the “Great Replacement”. He also offered white farmers asylum in the US.
Trump pointed to one clip showing white crosses, which Trump claimed were the graves of more than a thousand white farmers.
“These are the – these are burial sites right here. Each one of those white things you see is a cross. And there’s approximately a thousand of them. They’re all white farmers, the family of white farmers,” he said.
“What’s happening now is never reported. Nobody knows about it. All we know is we’re being inundated with people, with white farmers from South Africa, and it’s a big problem.”
However, his white genocide claims, which repeated claims he made during his first term, were quickly debunked by independent fact-checkers. The white crosses seen at the side of the road do not show graves. This was a claim circulating on social media in the days before the visit. A deep-dive on the image revealed it was actually part of a protest near the South African city of Newcastle on 5 September 2020, triggered by the murder of Glen and Vida Rafferty on their farm in August. The symbolic wooden crosses had been erected along the route by volunteers.
