Former president Donald Trump has shared AI-generated images that falsely claim Taylor Swift fans are supporting his campaign.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump shared screenshots of four posts on X that purport to show a number of young women all wearing “Swifties for Trump” T-shirts in a variety of styles. One of the screenshots claimed that Swifties are supporting Trump now after Taylor Swift canceled her concert in Vienna due to security concerns. Another image included the phrase “Taylor wants you to vote for Donald Trump.”
“I accept!” Trump captioned his post.
However, Trump’s post appears to contain a mixture of real and AI-generated images that falsely suggest a widespread and coordinated movement of Swifties for Trump. Using a tool created by nonprofit True Media to detect the spread of election-related deepfakes, WIRED found that many of the images shared by Trump show “substantial evidence of manipulation.”
One of the screenshots Trump shared was from an anonymous pro-Trump account with over 300,000 followers that regularly posts AI-generated images. Following its post about Swifties for Trump, this account shared a follow-up post that said the original Swifties for Trump post was “satire.”
While there doesn’t appear to be an active Swifties for Trump campaign initiative, there is an active Swifties for Harris group. “We do not represent every Swiftie, but I think there is a reason we don’t need AI to show our support for Kamala,” Irene Kim, cofounder of Swifties4Harris, tells WIRED.
There is at least one public Swiftie for Trump. Among the images shared by Trump on Sunday on Truth Social was a real picture of Jenna Piwowarczyk, who wore a homemade T-shirt to a Racine, Wisconsin, Trump rally in June, emblazoned with the words “Swifties for Trump.” Piwowarczyk is now selling her homemade T-shirts on Etsy.
Trump has consistently shared AI-generated images. Last week, Trump falsely claimed that the Harris campaign was using AI to artificially inflate crowd sizes at her rallies. Over the weekend, Trump also posted an AI-generated image on X of Harris speaking at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago with a Soviet Union flag hanging over the crowd.
Disinformation experts have warned about the threat posed to the integrity of elections by generative AI tools. Already this year, WIRED has tracked dozens of examples of content created using generative AI in elections across the globe.
Swift has not publicly endorsed any candidate for president, but she did endorse President Joe Biden in 2020. She has also strongly criticized Trump: After Trump made his infamous “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” comment in 2020 following Black Lives Matter protests in support of George Floyd, the pop superstar slammed the then-president for having “the nerve to feign moral superiority” after “stoking the fires of white supremacy and racism your entire presidency.”
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