Purported Deepfake of Barack Obama's Detention Reportedly Amplified by Donald Trump via Truth Social

July 20, 2025

Former President Donald Trump reportedly amplified an AI-generated deepfake video on Truth Social that depicted the arrest of former President Barack Obama in the Oval Office. The video, initially posted on TikTok, manipulated footage from a 2016 meeting between Trump and Obama, featuring edited scenes of Obama being handcuffed, kneeling, and imprisoned, along with doctored audio and visual elements derived from real political statements.

This incident underscores the importance of trustworthy AI practices and robust AI governance. Understanding and mitigating such incidents through HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM (Govern) can help establish guardrails for safe and secure AI usage.

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

GOVERN 4.3 — similarity 0.568, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.563, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
GOVERN 1.7 — similarity 0.561, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: unknown-tiktok-user, donald-trump
Alleged developer: unknown-deepfake-technology-developers
Alleged harmed parties: barack-obama, office-of-the-president-of-the-united-states, general-public, epistemic-integrity, democracy

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1150

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.