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| - A video which purportedly shows American musician and billionaire Taylor Swift talking about the ongoing fires in southern California has gone viral on social media.
What did she say?: In the minute-long clip, Swift appears to equate the Los Angeles (LA) wildfires to the devastation in Gaza, saying, "For over a year and half, Gaza has endured relentless bombing by missiles financed through the taxes paid by American citizens. This brutal assault has caused immense suffering for Gaza's residents and left its infrastructure in ruins while the world remained largely silent. However, in just two days, divine retribution struck the United States as a natural disaster consumed an area larger than Gaza itself."
The original video shows Swift speaking about talking about re-releasing one of her albums on talk show host Jimmy Fallon's show in November 2021, nearly two years before the ongoing attack began.
Additionally, the singer-songwriter has not made any public statements about Gaza or the California fires as on 15 January.
How did we find out the truth?: We ran a reverse image search on the viral video, which led us to a Instagram post by a jewellery brand featuring Swift.
It showed her in the same outfit, mentioning that Swift wore the brand's rings for an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and Saturday Night Live.
Taking a cue from this, we first ran a keyword search on YouTube, with the term 'Taylor Swift Jimmy Fallon'.
This led us to two videos showing Swift in the same outfit as the viral video, both of which were uploaded on on the show's verified YouTube channel.
In the first video, Swift spoke about a ten-minute version of a fan favourite song 'All Too Well' on her re-released album 'Red', narrating the story behind the song and the short film picturized on it.
The second video, also shared on the same day, also discussed the album and Swift's fans.
Swift, known for embedding 'easter eggs' into her albums, songs, and performances, spoke about how she has engaged and interacted with her fans through these ways.
Neither of these videos show Swift speaking about Gaza or the LA fires, both of which happened approximately two and three years respectively, after this interview aired.
No news reports: A keyword search for the term 'Taylor Swift Gaza' only returned news articles about her fans, dubbed 'Swifties', calling upon the singer to 'break her silence' about Gaza.
We did not find any credible reports, posts, releases or statements about Swift making any statement about Israel or Palestine.
Similarly, a search for 'Taylor Swift LA Fire' also did not show any statements by the songwriter.
What about the video?: We submitted the video to Bengaluru-based startup Contrails.Ai's deepfake detection tool.
Its tool found that the audio section of the clip was fake, showing "almost 100% high confidence AI Generation predicted for the first 40 seconds when there's a Speaker Audio."
However, for the video section, it showed that it was real. For this, an expert's review on the report stated that the tool's prediction was "false."
"AI model isn't able to differentiate between low resolution pixels & AI manipulation signal leading to the false prediction," it added.
Conclusion: A deepfake of Taylor Swift has gone viral with the false claim that she called the LA fires "divine retribution" for the US funding Israel to attack Gaza.
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