Video of Bangladeshi demonstrators wading across river is AI-generated
- Published on December 15, 2025 at 10:04
- 2 min read
- By Eyamin SAJID, AFP Bangladesh
A video of people wading across a river while waving Bangladeshi flags and signs was created with AI, contrary to posts claiming it showed protesters who swam through the Tentulia River in mid-November to demand a bridge linking their island district to the mainland. The circulating video has multiple visual errors indicative of AI-generated content and differs from genuine footage of the demonstration.
"Brave students and youths are heading towards Dhaka after crossing the Tentulia River for their five-point demands, including the construction of the Bhola-Barisal bridge," reads the Bengali-language caption of a Facebook video shared on November 15, 2025.
The video appears to show a group wading across a river while holding aloft Bangladeshi national flags and signs and banners.
It circulated after more than a dozen people from the island district Bhola swam through the strong currents of the Tentulia River on November 14 as part of a "long march" to the capital Dhaka to illustrate their demand for a bridge that links the island to Barisal on the mainland (archived link).
The protesters would later block a key intersection in Dhaka and staged a rally to reiterate the demand, as well as to call for the establishment of a medical university in Bhola, a public university, gas connections, and other essential facilities (archived link).
The same video was also shared in similar posts elsewhere on Facebook.
"Emotions are fine but it is bad when it crosses the limit. No one will take responsibility if someone gets hurt," read a comment on one of the posts.
Another said: "Bhola-Barisal bridge is our life's demand."
But a closer analysis of the footage shows multiple visual inconsistencies indicative of content generated with AI tools.
At one point in the video, a man appears to possess three arms while at another point a flag remains aloft without being held up. The Bengali-language text on the white flags is also unintelligible.
Hive Moderation's AI video detector determined with a probability of 99.5 percent that the video contained "AI-generated or deepfake content" (archived link).
A subsequent keyword search led to genuine footage of the protest published on the verified Facebook page of Ekattor Television on November 14, which shows there were fewer demonstrators, flags and banners (archived link). The participants are also less uniformly arranged than they appear in the falsely shared video.
AFP has previously debunked other AI-generated content misrepresented as showing authentic events.
Copyright © AFP 2017-2025. Any commercial use of this content requires a subscription. Click here to find out more.
Is there content that you would like AFP to fact-check? Get in touch.
Contact us
