HISPI Project Cerebellum HISPI PROJECT CEREBELLUM

Purported Deepfake Mimicking RTÉ Broadcast Falsely Announced Irish Presidential Candidate Catherine Connolly's Withdrawal

October 22, 2025

A deepfake video, resembling an RTÉ broadcast, circulated falsely announcing the withdrawal of Irish presidential candidate Catherine Connolly. The clip was spread across social media platforms and reported to the Electoral Commission. This incident underscores the importance of safe and secure AI practices in preventing such harmful misinformation. To learn more about governance and harm prevention, consider joining our Project Cerebellum community and exploring HISPI's TAIM (Govern) to ensure trustworthy AI.

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Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

Alleged deployer
unknown-malicious-actors-impersonating-catherine-connolly, unknown-malicious-actors
Alleged developer
unknown-deepfake-technology-developers, unknown-voice-cloning-technology-developers
Alleged harmed parties
voters-in-ireland, rte, general-public-of-ireland, epistemic-integrity, electoral-integrity, catherine-connolly, truth, democracy

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1258

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.