Video of Palki Sharma Talking About Indian Man Arrested in Bahrain Is a Deepfake

The video is a deepfake. Sharma has not reported on an Indian national being arrested in Bahrain.

A deepfake of Palki Sharma is being shared to claim that it shows an authentic video of her reporting on the consequences of an Indian national being arrested for espionage in Bahrain.

(Source: Facebook/Altered by The Quint)

A video of Firstpost journalist Palki Sharma reportedly talking about an Indian national who was arrested in Bahrain is being shared on social media.

What does she say?: In the videom she talks about "what India's quiet cooperation with US-Israeli intelligence is doing to its own citizens abroad," saying that across West Asia, Indian nationals are associated with Israeli-linked operations.

• Sharma goes on the talk about Gulf countries' likelihood of 'thinking twice' before hiring Indians because of this, and because of "India's role in tracking Iranian naval assets during the Iris Dina incident."

• "Ordinary workers could end up paying the price for decisions made at the top," she is heard saying.

An archived version of this post can be seen here.

(Source: Facebook/Screenshot)

(Archived versions of more posts sharing this claim can be seen here and here.)

Is it true?: No, the claim is false, as the video is a deepfake.

How do we know?: We looked for recent videos of Sharma's segment, called Vantage, on Firstpost's YouTube channel.

• Here, we found a report of her in the same outfit and background, published on 10 March.

• This report was about Iran's new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, which did not make any mention about an Indian national being arrested in Bahrain.

• Since there was no evidence of her making the statement heard in the claim, we ran it through AI-generated content detection tools.

• Hive Moderation's tool showed 92.1 percent confidence that the claim was an AI-generated one.

The tool showed high confidence in the video being AI-generated.

(Source: Hive Moderation/Screenshot)

Hiya's Deepfake Voice detection tool gave the audio an authenticity score of one out of 100, calling it a deepfake.

The tool was highly confident that the audio element is a deepfake..

(Source: Hiya/Screenshot)

• We also submitted the video to Deepfake-o-meter, which tested it on ten of its tools.

• Three of them showed high certainty that the video was an AI-generated one.

Two detectors found it to be AI-generated.

(Source: Hive Deepfake-o-meter/Screenshot)

Two more detectors showed high confidence in the video being an AI-generated one.

(Source: Hive Deepfake-o-meter/Screenshot)

Was an Indian national arrested in Bahrain?: There is no evidence to support this claim.

• Team WebQoof recently debunked a similar claim, where we found that 16 people were recently arrested on charges of espionage and posting videos that showed the aftermath of the Iranian aggression.

• However, none of them was an Indian national.

There is no evidence to support the claim that an Indian national was arrested in Bahrain.

(Source: The Quint)

Conclusion: An AI-manipulated video of Palki Sharma is being shared to claim that she reported about the impact of an Indian national being arrested for espionage in Bahrain.

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