A video purportedly featuring Navy Chief Admiral Dinesh Tripathi condemning the Indian Air Force (IAF) by stating that advanced Pakistan Navy systems tracked and detected Indian fighter jets during Operation Sindoor is being shared on social media.
Here's what he said:
During Operation Sindoor, we realised early that our jets were being cleanly picked up and tracked by Pakistan Navy systems running advanced Chinese suits. That told us the environment was being shaped for an information victory, not just a tactical engagement. If we had deployed major naval assets forward, even a minor contact or exaggerated claim could have been turned into a global embarrassment. Keeping our capital ships inside was a deliberate force protection and perception management choice. You deny the enemy the spectacle they are preparing for. In that sense, the Navy protected its credibility and there is a lesson in this for the Air Force too. Sometimes, the strongest move against Pakistan is refusing the engagement they are trying to script."
Is the claim true?: No, the claim is false as this video is manipulated using artifcial intelligence (AI).
What we found: At first, we ran a relevant keyword search to check whether Admiral Tripathi had made such comments in the public forum. However, we did not find anything.
We, then, divided the clip into multiple screenshots and ran a Google reverse image search on some of them.
It led us to longer version of the same viral video on news agency ANI's YouTube channel from 2 December.
Team WebQoof went through the entire video and found no such comments by Tripathi, as heard in the viral video.
Tripathi spoke at the annual press briefing in New Delhi.
Anomalies in the viral clip: We slowed the viral clip and noticed that at some spots the lip movement did not match with words being spoken.
This led us to run the video on the AI-detection tool Deepfake-O-Meter, where five of its parameters concluded that the video was AI-manipulated. The scores were 99.8 percent, 98.9 percent, 99.2 percent, 96 percent and 97.5 percent.
PIB clarification: The Press Information Bureau's (PIB) fact-check unit clarified that the claim was false and the video was AI-generated.
It also mentioned that Tripathi had not made any such statements.
Conclusion: The viral video is AI-manipulated and not real, as claimed.
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