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Rabat – A BBC Panorama investigation has discovered that Donald Trump supporters have shared fake AI images to sway African American voters in favour of the former president.
The deepfakes emerged on Sunday night in wake of Trump’s success in three more primary election contests. This puts him in the lead over Biden in the upcoming November presidential election, but Trump’s success now lies in the hands of African American voters.
The BBC have discovered that these deepfakes have been made and shared by US voters themselves, one of whom being Mark Kate, who works at a conservative radio show in Florida.
Kate created an image of the former president, smiling and with arms around a group of African American women at a party, and later uploaded it to his Facebook account, where he has more than one million followers.
However, Kate denies causing any influence and instead has said: “If anybody’s voting one way or another because of one photo they see on a Facebook page, that’s a problem with that person, not with the post itself.”
Cliff Albright is co-founder of Black Voters Matter, an organisation that promotes African Americans to vote, and fears that these fake AI images will influence the outcome of the election. Despite these concerns, no evidence has yet arisen linking these deepfakes to Trump’s campaign for presidential election.
African American voters played a pivotal role in Joe Biden’s success in the 2020 elections. However, a recent New York Times and Sienna College poll discovered that in six key swing states, only 71% of African Americans are predicted to back Biden in November, which is a steep decline from the 92% nationally in the last election.
The deep fakes are just one of several examples where images are being manipulated to portray Trump as a popular figure within the African American community in the wake of the rapidly approaching US presidential elections.
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