Trump Deepfakes, Misinformation Flood X After Conviction

(Bloomberg) — Donald Trump’s supporters blasted artificial intelligence-generated images through social media after the former president was convicted of felony charges, using deepfakes to promote the idea that Trump is the victim of a corrupt system.

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Accounts on X with millions of followers amplified images of Trump within minutes after a New York jury announced that they’d declared him guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records.

The influencer Matt Wallace posted a fabricated image to his 1.7 million followers depicting Trump standing resolutely in a suit in front of a jail cell. Another, obviously fake picture from other popular accounts showed the Republican presidential candidate shirtless and adorned in American flag tattoos accompanied by a message urging followers to “Take the country back.”

Yet another vocal Trump-backer with 2 million followers pushed out a stylized picture of Trump wearing a cowboy hat and a belt of ammunition. “The first outlaw president,” said the accompanying tweet.

Such imagery represents an emerging front in the spread of political misinformation, a trend that’s likely to intensify ahead of the November presidential elections and three more criminal trials in which Trump will be the defendant. Even pictures obviously created by generative AI services present a challenge for potential voters hoping to find true information in a chaotic news environment, according to analysts.

“When deepfakes are used as jokes there’s always the risk that these go viral among an audience that doesn’t understand where it came from or that it’s meant as a joke,” Maarten Schenk, co-founder of the fact checking service LeadStories, said in an interview with Bloomberg News prior to the Trump conviction.

“It’s misinformation meant to look almost like satire, and then it goes viral,” he said.

According to X’s policy, users “may not share synthetic, manipulated, or out-of-context media that may deceive or confuse people and lead to harm.”

Prominent right-wing voices seized on the conviction, circulating unproven allegations that criminal cases against Trump are politically motivated. The former president has frequently repeated the talking points in speeches.

Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson suggested without evidence that Trump was likely to be assassinated, and that his supporters should distance themselves from family members who believed that the former president illegally oversaw a scheme to send hush money payments to a former adult actress. Carlson has nearly 13 million followers on the service.

X owner Elon Musk said in a post on his website that the jury’s decision caused “great damage” to the public’s faith in the US justice system. Musk recently has been in touch with the former president, advising him on potential cryptocurrency policy. X didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the post.

Immediately after the conviction in a post on his own Truth Social service, the Trump campaign urged voters to express their support by showing up at the polls in November.

AI-generated content, particularly voice cloning technology, poses an alarming threat to the integrity of upcoming elections, according to a report from the Center for Countering for Digital Hate released Friday. The ease with which internet users can create such content, with relatively few limitations, “inevitably will be weaponized” to mislead voters, the research group said in a statement.

OpenAI also said Thursday it had shut down five influence operations, including networks in Russia, China, Iran and Israel that exploiting its technology in the past three months.

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