Fact Check: Did Donald Trump Threaten Canadian PM Justin Trudeau? Viral Audio Put To AI Test
The clip is supposedly a recording of a speech by Trump during which he says, ‘Mr Trudeau ... if elected again in Canada, I personally will have him arrested if he steps one foot in the US…’
As Republican candidate Donald Trump was declared the victor in the US presidential election, a clip of the president-elect supposedly threatening the Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, went viral on TikTok (examples archived here, here, and here).
The clip is supposedly a recording of a speech by Trump during which he says, “Mr Trudeau ... if elected again in Canada, I personally will have him arrested if he steps one foot in the United States and I'll do all of Canada a favour and throw away the key. I’ll end the dictatorship of Canada once and for all. Stay strong, Canada, our neighbors, our brothers. God bless you all. Thanks.”
However, Logically Facts found no record of Donald Trump making such a statement. According to experts, there is a high probability the audio was created with artificial intelligence.
High likelihood of AI-generated audio
We contacted two experts to verify the authenticity of the audio. Both tested the audio clip with AI detection tools and found it likely to be fake.
Professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information, Hany Farid, told Logically Facts, “I have analyzed this audio with a model trained to distinguish real from AI-generated voices. The model confidently flags this recording as AI-generated.”
Nicolas Müller, a machine-learning research scientist at the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied and Integrated Security, tested the same audio on their platform Deepfake Total. “The AI system predicts that the audio is fake,” Müller told Logically Facts.
This tool gave the Trump audio a “deepfake score” of 99.9 percent. The result “indicates that the soundtrack in the video has a likelihood of being a deepfake with probability of 99.9 percent”.
Deepfake detection models can strongly indicate whether an audio is authentic, but their results cannot be taken as definitive proof.
However, other clues suggest that the audio is not real. “In addition, the voice has the tell-tale signs of being AI-generated in terms of cadence and intonation,” Farid disclosed to Logically Facts.
What else did we find?
A Google search did not lead us to any results of Trump making such a statement. The latest reports on Trump and Trudeau reference the Canadian prime minister’s congratulatory message to Trump on his re-election. They do not report any threats made by Trump to Trudeau.
In the TikTok clips, the audio is accompanied by either two side-by-side images of Trump and Trudeau or a photo of them standing next to each other. A reverse image search revealed that the pictures are not recent or related to the election. For example, the image of Trudeau can be traced back to 2021, and the image of the two together was captured in 2017 during Trudeau’s visit to the White House.
The difficulty of verifying AI audio
Checking whether an audio clip is real or fake has become more complex as technology advances quickly and AI voices become more convincing. Audio recordings provide less context to check, such as visual clues shared in AI images and videos.
“Determining why audio is classified as fake or real can be complex,” Müller told Logically Facts. “Genuine audio often includes natural prosody and liveliness that aligns with the spoken content, but with advancements in TTS [Text-to-Speech] technology, it’s challenging to pinpoint a single feature that distinguishes authentic audio from synthetic.”
Speaking to Logically Facts previously, Oli Buckley, now a professor in cyber security at Loughborough University, suggested paying attention to the text-to-speech language used and asking a few simple questions to determine if the audio is real or fake.
“It’s things like being objective, would the person say it? If it’s out of character then how likely is it they did say it? Listen for the rhythm and cadence of the words, is it how the person normally talks?"
Logically Facts has contacted the office of Donald Trump but has not yet received a response.
This report first appeared on logicallyfacts.com, and has been republished on ABP Live as part of a special arrangement. Apart from the headline, no changes have been made in the report by ABP Live.
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