Former President Donald Trump shares AI-generated photos that falsely claim taylor swift fans are supporting his campaign.
in a post Truth SocialTrump shared screenshots of four posts on X, showing several young women wearing “Swifties for Trump” T-shirts in different styles. One screenshot claimed Swifties were now supporting Trump after Taylor Swift canceled her concert in Vienna due to safety concerns. Another image included the phrase “Taylor wants you to vote for Donald Trump.”
Trump wrote on his post, “I accept!”
However, Trump’s post appeared to contain a mix of real and AI-generated images that falsely suggested a widespread and coordinated movement of Swifties for Trump. A tool created by the nonprofit True Media In tracing the spread of election-related deepfakes, WIRED found that many of the images shared by Trump showed “substantial evidence of manipulation”.
One of the screenshots Trump shared was taken from an anonymous pro-Trump account that has more than 300,000 followers and regularly posts AI-generated images. After his post about Swifties for Trump, the account shared a Follow-up Posts which said the original Swifties post to Trump was “satire.”
While there don’t appear to be any active Swifties for the Trump campaign initiative, there is still an active initiative. Swifties for Harris group. “We don’t represent every Swiftie, but I think there’s a reason we don’t need AI to show our support for Kamala,” Irene Kim, co-founder Swifties4Harristold Wired.
There is at least one public Swiftie for Trump. Among the photos Trump shared on Truth Social on Sunday was an actual photo of Jenna Piwowarski, who wore a homemade T-shirt with the words “Swifties for Trump” written on it at a Racine, Wisconsin, Trump rally in June. Piwowarski is now selling her homemade T-shirts on Etsy.
Trump has been constantly sharing photos generated by AI. Last week, Trump falsely claimed that the Harris campaign was using AI to artificially inflate the size of crowds at his rallies. Over the weekend, Trump also posted an image generated by AI on X, of Harris giving a speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago with a Soviet Union flag waving above the crowd.
Disinformation experts have warned about the threat posed by generative AI tools to the integrity of elections. Already this year, WIRED has tracked Dozens of examples of content created using generative AI in elections around the world.
Swift has not publicly endorsed any candidate for president, but she did support President Joe Biden in 2020. She has also strongly criticized Trump: Trump has been criticised for his infamous “When the looting starts, the shooting starts too” Remarks following Black Lives Matter protests in support of George Floyd in 2020, Pop superstar slammed The then-president was accused of “daring to pretend to have moral superiority” after “fanning the flames of white supremacy and racism throughout his tenure.”
