Deepfake of Joe Biden Circulates After Withdrawal from 2024 Race

Last week, a deepfake video of President Joe Biden cursing his critics went viral on social media. The video, which emerged shortly after Biden announced he would not seek reelection, is a fabricated clip created by a meme account. While it was pretty evident in the content itself that the video was a deepfake, we wanted to test it out and see exactly what was altered about this video.  We ran it through the Chess Solutions Authentica platform to showcase some of the capabilities it has to not only detect, but explain what was fake about the video and how we knew it was fake. In instances like this one, if you are looking to identify whether (and how) a piece of media has been manipulated, sign up  for more information on how to get access to Authentica and our upcoming browser based experience.

What Happened Exactly?

The Biden video, first posted on July 21, 2024, by the account "Prison Mitch," depicts President Biden delivering an expletive-filled message from the Oval Office. The clip shows Biden purportedly saying:

"My fellow Americans, I want to take a moment to address some of the hateful shit you have been talking about me. Many of you have said I am suffering from brain worms, or that I have applesauce for brains. Well, I won't mince words, so here it is: Fuck you."

This video, bearing a PBS News logo, quickly spread across X (formerly Twitter) and other platforms, misleading many viewers. It was reposted on an account called “End Wokeness” which has 2.8M followers, helping the video get even more exposure.  According to AFP, the actual footage originates from a speech Biden gave following an attempted assassination of Donald Trump, where he called for calm and denounced political violence.

PBS News confirmed the video is a deepfake, stating that the manipulated clip misuses their logo to deceive viewers, and that they, “do not condone altering news video or audio in any way that could mislead the audience”. Biden's original message was entirely different, focusing on national unity and condemning violence.

Analyzing the Video with Authentica

We used Authentica, the Chess deepfake assessment and attribution platform, to analyze the video. Authentica uses various plugins that analyze the video and produce graphs and reports showing how various parts of the video point to the conclusion that it is a deepfake. It creates and analyzes physiology, lip motion, and other classic media assessment techniques.  In this article, we are examining the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) factors and lip motion to highlight typical inconsistencies in deepfake videos and explain how we know the President Biden video was a deepfake. If you are interested in learning more or using the product, fill out our form, and we will get in touch.

Figure 1: Interframe motion vectors of pixels in the lip muscles are physiologically incoherent and move in directions inconsistent with normal human lip motion.

Figure 2: The inconsistent variation in the blockiness and blurriness metrics across the face and surrounding area often indicates the presence of manipulation. Natural imagery generally exhibits a more consistent distribution of blockiness and blurriness across an entire image. Often, the relationship between blurriness and blockiness artifacts presents opportunities for detection and signature attribution. 

So What?

Deepfakes can be fun, as evidenced by their use in gaming, memes, and the entertainment industry.  But, when in the wrong hands, manipulated media can be used to spread misinformation, pose a serious threat to cyber security, and undermine a common source of truth - crucial for the effectiveness of democracy. Advanced assessment tools like Authentica are pivotal in identifying and attributing such fabrications so that we can distinguish malicious manipulated media. Generating probabilities that a given video, image, or audio is fake isn’t enough, so we built Authentica to provide the data needed to determine “Who” and “How”, so our customer’s can answer the question “What Now.” As the 2024 election season progresses, it is essential for people to critically assess the content they encounter online and rely on credible sources for accurate information. Click on our website to sign up for more information on how to get access to Authentica and our browser based experience.