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Claim: A Facebook user shared a video of Tinubu announcing the abolishing of Naira and plans to use dollars instead.
Verdict: Our findings show the clip was digitally altered as we found the original content by Arise News.
Full Text
On May 29, 2023, the recently elected President of Nigeria, Bola Tinubu, said in his inaugural speech that the monetary policies required a “thorough house-cleaning.”
Following this, on June 14, 2023, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) announced the unification of all segments of the foreign exchange market – replacing the old regime of multiple exchange rate “windows” for different purposes.
On August 26, 2023, Folami Adeyinka posted a video on Facebook showing Arise TV reporter Oji Okpe announcing that Mr Tinubu has abolished the use of Naira and adopted the use of dollars.
The 25-second video shows the anchor saying the president is trying to change the Nigerian currency to dollars. The video then shows Mr Tinubu saying, “We are planning to abolish the usage of Naira and start using dollars.”
The claim has also appeared on different social media platforms like Instagram and other Facebook accounts.
The post met with conflicting views on Instagram, with some users for and others against the post. @ootconsult said, “Nothing good ever comes out of Arise Tv, worse journalism”, while another user, @23_24_beautybar, wrote, “This isn’t real, it’s AI-generated speech look at the journalist’s mouth movement and Tinubu’s mouth movement.
The sensitivity of the post in relation to the country’s current economy and the potential implications of this claim on the society made DUBAWA opt to investigate the claim.
Verification
DUBAWA noticed some irregularities in the lips-to-speech synchronization of the video and found that the voiceover was faster than the movement of the lips. We also noticed an inconsistency in the voice-over and the way some words were pronounced, which suggests it is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) generated video.
We used INVID to analyze the video’s contents. Our analysis confirmed that the video had been manipulated, with a voiceover strategically added to deceive viewers into thinking it was a genuine statement from President Tinubu.
A reverse image search on the INVID tool led to the actual video of the president speaking at a press conference in 2022, where he announced his intention to run for the presidency in Nigeria.
We also checked the social media account of the TV station and the president’s handle to see if anything related to this claim had been shared. We found a statement by Arise News on X labelling the video as fake.
“DISCLAIMER! ARISE News totally dissociates itself from a DEEP FAKE VIDEO making the rounds on social media mimicking the What’s Trending segment’s anchor Ojy Okpe. The digitally-altered video which claims that President Bola Tinubu plans to abolish the naira in favour of the dollar is the handiwork of Fake News peddlers,” parts of the statement read.
Finally, we conducted an advanced search to see if other news platforms reported the news but we could not find any such report in the news.
Conclusion
This claim is false! We found the original content of the video using INVID, where Arise News debunked the video.
