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| - FACT CHECK: Has Donald Trump Ordered The Nigerian Government To Release Political Activist Nnamdi Kanu?
A viral video shared on X purports to show President-elect Donald Trump ordering the Nigerian government to release British political activist Nnamdi Kanu.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP IS THE EXPECTED BLESSING TO THE WORLD pic.twitter.com/0Es7fU5tF3
— ROZ (@ROZ_BIAFRAARMY) November 20, 2024
Verdict: False
A content detection scan using the website “TrueMedia.org” indicates the video contains audio that has been generated with artificial intelligence (AI). In addition, a media forensics and AI expert confirmed the audio is synthetic via an email to Check Your Fact.
Fact Check:
Trump has chosen Republican Missouri Rep. Billy Long to lead the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), according to The Washington Post. The agency’s current commissioner, Danny Werfel, previously said he intended to stay in his role until 2027, the outlet reported.
The X video, viewed over 40,000 times as of writing, purports to show Trump ordering the Nigerian government to release Kanu.
“Today, I am calling on the Nigerian government to immediately release Mr. Nnamdi Kanu, who has been detained under circumstances that raise questions of fairness, human rights, and basic justice. Nnamdi Kanu’s detention has gone on far too long and it’s time for the Nigerian government to respect the principles of freedom and the rule of law,” Trump appears to say in the video.
Trump also appears to say that he will withdraw medical, financial, and humanitarian aid from Nigeria unless Kanu is released by the end of Nov. 2024.
The claim is false. Check Your Fact conducted a content detection scan using the website, “TrueMedia.org,” and the results indicate the video shows “substantial evidence of manipulation.” Specifically, the video contains audio that has been generated with AI, according to the results of the same scan. (RELATED: Economist Cover Of Trump And Putin Is Fake)
Likewise, Check Your Fact did not find the claim referenced on Trump’s official website, his TRUTH Social account, or his verified social media accounts. In addition, Check Your Fact found no credible news reports to support the claim. Actually, the opposite is true.
On Dec. 6, Reuters debunked the claim. According to the outlet, the AI-generated audio was “laid over an unrelated video clip of Trump’s victory speech after he won the U.S. presidential election on November 6, 2024.”
Furthermore, Dr. Walter Scheirer, a media forensics and AI expert at the University of Notre Dame, confirmed the audio is synthetic via an email to Check Your Fact.
“This video couples what appears to be existing campaign footage of President-Elect Donald Trump with a synthetic audio track that attempts to make a case for the Nigerian government to release political activist Nnamdi Kanu. The audio doesn’t match the video at all, and keeps playing when there are obvious breaks in the original speech where audience members are clapping (and those claps cannot be heard in this video),” Scheirer said.
Kanu, a British political activist who leads the banned Indigenous People of Biafra movement, was denied bail for the second time by a Nigerian judge in May 2024, according to Reuters. Kanu was arrested in 2015 and again in 2021 after breaching his 2017 bail terms. He has pleaded not guilty to seven counts of terrorism, the outlet reported.
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