On May 21, a meeting in the Oval Office between South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and U.S. President Donald Trump turned confrontational as Trump made false and misleading claims about targeted killings of white farmers in South Africa. While Ramaphosa appeared to keep his composure during the interaction, a video shared on social media appears to include audio of the South African leader railing against Trump's "white supremacist delusions." The audio is likely artificially generated. There is no official record of this speech from Ramaphosa, and any comments he has made about Trump since the meeting have not included the insults heard in the video. Tools used to detect content generated by artificial intelligence flagged the audio as fake, and the user who uploaded the earliest version of the video has a history of posting similarly altered content.
THE CLAIM
"Trump, stop using South Africa as a shield for your white supremacist delusions, you pathological liar and hate spewing old colonial ghost," starts posted on May 23 to a Facebook group for 好色tvs opposed to U.S. President Donald Trump. The caption under the video says, "South Africa finally found the guts to standup against Trump."
The video shows clips of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and Trump along with text captions of the voiceover, which sounds similar to Ramaphosa.
A watermark indicates it was originally posted to on May 22, where it received nearly 16,000 likes and more than 383,000 views. The video also appeared on on May 23 with more that 26,000 likes and 20,000 shares, and on on May 23 with 1,624 likes. 聽
RATING: Altered audio
Comments under the posts show many viewers were unsure if the video was real, while others questioned why the president didn't say these things during his visit to Washington, D.C.听
A keyword search of some of the phrases heard in the video found only reposts of the video on other sites.听
Trump screened a video and showed pictures he said were proof of targeted killings of white South African farmers during a tense meeting between the leaders on May 21.听
The video included scenes of a field of white crosses Trump said were 鈥渂urial sites鈥 for a thousand white farmers; however, , and instead were part of a 2020 demonstration meant to memorialize victims of violence against farmers in South Africa.听
Trump also held up a still image printed on a piece of paper he said showed "white farmers that are being buried." However, it was actually a screengrab taken from one of their videos of humanitarian workers burying bodies in the city of Goma in Democratic Republic of Congo.
While South Africa has one of the , a majority of the victims are Black.听
After the meeting, Ramaphosa appeared to play down the tension, describing discussions during lunch as "" during a briefing with reporters.听
Ramaphosa also said he thought Trump in the claims of "white genocide" he promoted during the meeting.听
"The issue that he kept raising, or he raised prominently, is the issue of genocide," Ramaphosa said. "And when he was asked by one of you, and thank God one of you asked, whether he was convinced that there was genocide, he says no, he's not convinced."
After returning to South Africa, Ramaphosa told an audience at the Sustainable Infrastructure Development Symposium in Cape Town on May 27 he was "" by what some had called an ambush by the U.S. president. The talk did not include any of the insults heard in the TikTok video, nor was Trump's name mentioned.
A request for comment from the office of the South African president was not immediately returned.
Signs of a deepfake
好色tvran the audio from the video through four different tools used to detect content generated by artificial intelligence. Three out of the four tools identified the audio as a deepfake 鈥 still images, audio and video that have been manipulated or wholly created by AI tools 鈥 while the fourth, ElevenLabs, indicated it was unlikely the clip was generated using its own tool.听
No AI detection tools are 100 per cent accurate, so they should be used in tandem with other methods, such as searching for news coverage of the speech.
There are a few hints in the audio that suggest it was created using AI.听
The sound of breaths is missing in a couple places where it would be natural, and there appears to be a typo in the text used to create the voiceover, calling Trump a "politically clown facing trials."聽
The who appears to have created the video routinely posts manipulated content, including some .听
SOURCES
Claim posted to May 22, 2025 (), on May 23, 2025 (), May 23, 2025 () and May 23, 2025 ()
Pumza Fihlani. On the South African road incorrectly identified as a 'burial site' by Trump. BBC News . May 22, 2025 ()
Tim Cocks, Nellie Peyton. A check of Trump's false claims about white genocide in South Africa. Reuters . May 22, 2025 ()
Bastian Herre, Fiona Spooner, Max Roser. Homicides. Our World in Data . Accessed May 30, 2025 ()
LIVE: South Africa's Cyril Ramaphosa speaks after Trump meeting. Reuters, via . May 21, 2025 ()
Gregory Svirnovskiy. South Africa鈥檚 president jokes about Trump dust-up. Politico . May 27, 2025 ()
AI speech classifier. ElevenLabs . Accessed May 28,. 2025 ()
deepfake voice detector, used as a plugin. Accessed May 28, 2025 ()听
Resemble AI Free Audio Deepfake Detection . Accessed May 28, 2025 ()听
AI-generated content detection tool. Hive Moderation . Accessed May 28, 2025 ()
TikTok for @tian128560n, accessed May 30, 2025 (), and video labelled as AI-generated, ()
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