Video of Elon Musk commenting on inter-country ride-hailing prank is a deepfake
- Published on September 13, 2024 at 17:14
- 3 min read
- By Oluseyi AWOJULUGBE, AFP Nigeria
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“Elon Musk reacted on Nigeria and South Africa Bolt incident (sic),” reads the caption of a TikTok video shared more than 900 times since it was published on August 24, 2024.
The post claims to show Musk appearing to address a dispute between Nigerians and South Africans.
“If I would say something concerning this complicated issue going on with Nigeria and South Africa Bolt issue. South Africa needs to apologise to Nigeria,” Musk appears to say in the clip. “Everyone knows Nigeria has a lot of scammers in it. Please be warned ...”
The rest of the sentence is inaudible.
The link to the video was also shared here on Facebook.
Inter-country prank
Bolt, an Estonian ride-hailing company that operates in dozens of countries, was caught up in a dispute between Nigerians and South Africans in late August.
The company said it incurred financial losses after people booked and cancelled ride requests in both countries (archived here).
This came amid heightened tensions between the two countries after 23-year-old law student Chidimma Adetshina was forced to pull out of a South African beauty contest after her Nigerian heritage sparked a national controversy and a government investigation (archived here).
Adetshina, born in Soweto to a Nigerian father and a South African mother of Mozambican descent, was the subject of vicious, xenophobic attacks on social media after being announced as a finalist in July.
An investigation into her citizenship by the Home Affairs ministry uncovered “prima facie indications” that Adetshina’s mother might have committed fraud and stolen the identity of a South African woman after the Miss SA hopeful was born, the ministry said (archived here).
She was later invited to join a beauty pageant in Nigeria and was crowned Miss Universe Nigeria (archived here).
Altered video
AFP Fact Check extracted keyframes from the video using the InVID WeVerify tool.
A reverse image search of these images led to a two-year-old video published on YouTube by the American media company Bloomberg (archived here).
The video description indicates that the clip was an excerpt from a longer TED interview in 2022 (archived here).
In both the TikTok clip and the TED interview, he is seen wearing the same clothes and earpiece, against the same gradient purple background.
In the original interview, Musk spoke about various issues, including his plans to acquire Twitter, which he later rebranded as X.
However, he did not mention Nigeria – and could not have discussed the Bolt dispute with South Africa as it happened two years later.
This suggests that the clip shared on TikTok was digitally altered using one of the many available online tools capable of creating deepfake videos.
In addition, closer analysis shows that the movements of Musk’s mouth look unnatural. His last few words also sound unnaturally garbled.
AFP Fact Check extracted the audio from the altered video and ran it through Loccus.ai — an audio tool that looks for specific forensic traces left by voice generators.
The result showed a 99-percent probability the audio was generated with an AI tool.
AFP Fact Check has debunked numerous social media posts using AI-generated audio or deepfake videos, such as here and here. Musk has previously been targeted, notably in posts using deepfake videos of him pushing get-rich-quick scams.
We created this guide with tips to identify AI-generated content.
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