DAILY TRUST
Donald Trump has shared ‘doctored’ images on social media showing Taylor Swift and her fans supporting his presidential campaign, in an apparent effort to tap into the pop singer’s mega star power in the US election.
Swift has not yet publicly thrown her weight behind any presidential candidate in the November 5 election, but she backed President Joe Biden in 2020 and has previously been critical of Trump.
On Sunday, Trump shared screenshots of posts with manipulated images – including some that an expert said appeared to be AI-generated – suggesting that the pop star and her fans, popularly known as Swifties, support his campaign.
In his Truth Social post, which includes a poster of Swift clad in an Uncle Sam outfit and instructing her fans to vote for Trump, the former president wrote: “I accept!”
That poster is either “AI generated or just classically manipulated,” Hany Farid, a digital forensics expert at the University of California, Berkeley, told AFP.
The post also includes photos of women wearing shirts with the slogan “Swifties for Trump,” some of which Farid said had the “tell-tale signs of being AI generated.”
What makes the mash-up “particularly devious” is that is a combination of real and fake imagery, with at least one photo of a woman wearing such a shirt looking legitimate, Farid said.
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