Deepfake Shared as Real Video of Dhruv Rathee Praising BJP Govt in West Bengal
The video is a deepfake. There is no evidence of Rathee making positive statements about the BJP in West Bengal.
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A video of content creator Dhruv Rathee, talking about the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in West Bengal, was shared on social media.
The claim: In the clip, Rathee purportedly talks about how the Trinamool Congress (TMC) government in West Bengal refused to divert or stop traffic for the construction of the orange line metro in Kolkata for seven years, stalling development.
He goes on to say that after the BJP government came to power, they did so in 120 hours. He also spoke about the 2021 post-poll violence in the state, saying that the BJP had reopened investigations into it, filing 121 FIRs.
At the time of writing this report, this post has gathered over 31,500 views.
Is it true?: No, there is no evidence of Rathee making such a statement. The video has been made using Artificial Intelligence (AI).
How did we find out the truth?: We went through Rathee's YouTube, X, and Instagram accounts to find this video, but did not find him making such statements.
As on 22 May, Rathee had only published two videos about the BJP government in West Bengal, touching upon post-poll violence and the newly elected Chief Minister, Suvendu Adhikari.
Neither of them touched upon metro construction or spoke about the BJP in a positive light.
While it is true that the BJP government has started work on the metro line in Kolkata, it has not yet been completed in 120 hours, as claimed.
Is it AI?: We ran the video through Hive Moderation's AI-generated content detector to check for AI-generated or modified elements.
The tool said that the audio was 98.4 percent likely to contain AI-generated speech.
Hive Moderation found that the video was AI-generated one.
(Source: Hive Moderation/Screenshot)
Similarly, Hiya's Deepfake Voice Detector gave the audio element a score of one out of 100, noting that the voice was likely a deepfake.
The sampled voice was found to be a deepfake.
(Source: Hiya/Screenshot)
Conclusion: An AI-generated video is being shared to falsely claim that it shows Dhruv Rathee praising the BJP government's work in West Bengal.
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