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Claim: A TikTok video shows President Biden criticising Nigeria’s Aliko Dangote for exorbitant fuel prices.
Verdict: False! The video of Biden appealing to Dangote to reduce the fuel price to N150 has been digitally altered. Besides, no reports from credible news outlets validate the post’s authenticity.
Full Text
Since the fuel subsidy removal in May 2023, Nigeria has been plunged into economic turmoil, causing citizens to demand an urgent reversal of the botched policy.
Besides the ongoing economic fuss, the Dangote Refinery, owned by business tycoon Aliko Dangote, was popularly perceived to sell petroleum at a cheaper rate. However, that has not been the case.
A social media influencer, Martins Vicent, popularly known as Verydarkblackman, shared a video of the United States of America (USA) president, Joe Biden, allegedly commenting on the need for Mr Dangote to sell fuel at a cheaper rate compared to other independent marketers.
The 28-second clip purportedly shows Mr Biden imploring the Nigerian business mogul to peg the petrol pump price to Nigerians at N150.
“Nigerian leaders are so mean they don’t care about their citizens. What they care about is to steal money. Tinubu, please try to arrange your country,” Mr Biden said in the clip.
When DUBAWA visited the account on Sunday, Nov. 10, 2024, the clip had amassed about 1,400 likes, 93 comments, and 556 reposts.
Certain irregular features in the video raised suspicion that it could have been digitally manipulated. Consequently, DUBAWA decided to verify its authenticity.
Verification
DUBAWA observed that President Biden’s mouth movement was not synchronised with the audio in the video, a common feature of digitally altered video characters.
With this knowledge, we downloaded the TikTok clip to conduct a video analysis on Deepware, a digital verification tool that detects anomalies in deepfake videos.
Results from its model — Deepware, Seferbekov, and Ensemble — detected a deepfake rate of 96%, 97%, and 95%, respectively.
Probing further, we conducted several keyword searches to determine if any local or international credible media outlet has reported such development but found no supporting information.
Finally, we combed through Mr Biden’s official X and Facebook handles and observed that he has not posted any such video.
Conclusion
Our research shows that the video has been digitally altered; hence, the claim is false.
