Analysis shows 'leaked' Vance rant about Musk is likely fake
- Published on March 31, 2025 at 22:59
- 3 min read
- By Daniel Patrick GALGANO, AFP USA
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"Everything that he's doing is getting criticized in the media, and he says that he's helping, and he's not. He's making us look bad. He's making me look bad," Vance appears to say in the clip, which was posted March 25, 2025 on Instagram.
The same audio has circulated elsewhere on social media, including on Instagram, Facebook, Threads, X, TikTok, YouTube and other websites such as Gettr, a platform catered toward American conservatives.
Trump appointed Musk to lead the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a cost-cutting team that has dramatically reshaped the federal government and ordered massive layoffs, drawing fire from lawmakers and the public.
With the billionaire dominating headlines on many domestic and economic issues, Vance has carved out a voice in foreign affairs, lambasting America's trans-Atlantic allies while promoting what he describes as an "America-first" agenda.
However, the "leaked" audio purporting to show Vance bashing Musk is likely a fabrication.
On March 24, Vance responded to an X post that featured the audio, saying it was "a fake AI-generated clip" (archived here).
The vice president's communications director, William Martin, also posted on X that the clip is "100% fake" (archived here).
Hany Farid, a media forensics expert at the University of California-Berkeley and the co-founder and chief science officer at GetReal Labs, a cybersecurity company focused on combating malicious artificial intelligence threats, analyzed the clip and determined that it is "likely inauthentic" (archived here).
He said the audio does not match Vance's typical speech patterns and that its poor quality is "highly suspicious," noting that disinformation spreaders often purposefully lower the quality of artificially generated clips to fool detection software.
"Audio deepfakes are becoming increasingly sophisticated, and there’s a growing trend of fabricated leaks targeting high-profile politicians and journalists," Farid and his team wrote in a March 24 email, citing two previous fakes that targeted Donald Trump Jr and the BBC’s James Waterhouse.
"In both cases, the manipulated audio was traced back to Russian Telegram channels."
AFP has debunked other claims about US politics here.
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