Trump shares doctored images showing Taylor Swift support

ERAS IN UK Taylor Swift fans pose next to a mural of the performer created by street artists MurWalls outside Wembley Stadium in London on Aug. 15, ahead of the first of five concerts she is playing at the stadium. —AFP

WASHINGTON—Swifties blasted Donald Trump for sharing doctored and satirical images showing Taylor Swift and her fans supporting his presidential campaign.

Swift has not yet publicly thrown her weight behind any presidential candidate in the Nov. 5 election, but she backed President Joe Biden in 2020 and has previously been critical of Trump.

On Sunday, Trump shared screenshots of posts with manipulated images and a news article marked “SATIRE” suggesting that the pop star and her fans, popularly known as Swifties, support his campaign.

In a post on his social media site Truth Social, which included a seeming parody of an Uncle Sam poster using the image of Swift and instructing her fans to vote for Trump, the former president wrote: “I accept!”

That image, in the style of a poster, was either “AI-generated or just classically manipulated,” Hany Farid, a digital forensics expert at the University of California, Berkeley, told AFP.

The post also includes photos of women wearing shirts with the slogan “Swifties for Trump,” some of which Farid said had the “tell-tale signs of being AI-generated.”

With the photos was a satirical article with the headline “Swifties Turning to Trump After ISIS Foiled Taylor Swift Concert.”

Swift canceled three shows in Vienna this month after authorities said they had foiled a planned attack. Local officials arrested a 19-year-old man who they said was inspired by Islamic State.

“Swifties for Trump is a massive movement that grows bigger every single day,” Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement when asked for comment about the fake Swift image.

Several Swift fans and watchdog groups said many of the images posted by Trump appeared to be deepfakes generated by artificial intelligence.

Advocates in the music industry, Hollywood and Washington have been pushing for federal legislation and other measures to fight the explosion of fake AI images online.

Trump’s post was “yet another example of AI’s power to create misinformation,” consumer group Public Citizen said. Some Swift fans called on her to take legal action against the former president. —reports from AFP, REUTERS

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