From Forbes
Fake Videos Purporting To Be Dead Trump Shooter Are Spreading On Social Media
By Alexandra S. Levine and Emily Baker-White
Hours after a gunman attempted to assassinate former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally on Saturday, videos of a person purporting to be the suspect began spreading rapidly across TikTok, X, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit and Telegram. The videos have been shared by both verified and unverified social media accounts, as well as handles purporting to belong to the gunman, who has been identified by the FBI as Thomas Matthew Crooks. Crooks was shot and killed by the Secret Service at the rally.
“My name is Thomas Matthew Crooks,” said a viral clip circulating Sunday that had been liked, watched or shared thousands of times on posts across the platforms. “I hate Republicans, I hate Trump, and guess what? You got the wrong guy.” (Some versions of the video then cut to footage of President Joe Biden.) Crooks was a registered Republican, though records show he donated $15 to a liberal voters group in 2021...
BBC Verify, which uses open source intelligence and investigative techniques to track mis- and disinformation online, reported that the man in the widely-viewed videos is not the shooter. UC Berkeley professor and deepfake expert Hany Farid reviewed the clips and told Forbes they do not appear to have been AI-generated...
Hany Farid is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences and the School of Information at UC Berkeley.
