Video claiming actor Dev is planning to visit Bangladesh with Sheikh Hasina is deepfake
A video has recently been posted on Facebook showing Indian actor Dev delivering a speech at a public rally in which he appears to announce that he will travel to Bangladesh together with Sheikh Hasina, the former prime minister of Bangladesh who was deposed. A fact-check by Dismislab found that the video is a deepfake version of a speech Dev actually delivered in Burdwan, India, in 2021.
On July 16, a 15-second video was posted from a Facebook profile with the caption, “Joy Bangla, Joy Bangabandhu 🥰🛶🛶✊✊” — a slogan associated with the Bangladesh Awami League and its founding leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. At the start of the video, Deepak Adhikari — the popular Indian actor and politician widely known by his stage name, Dev — is shown speaking into a microphone at a public rally. He is wearing a white shirt with a white scarf, or “uttoriyo,” draped around his neck. Two circular logos or images appear in the upper corners of the screen, with text beneath them reading, “I am the Awami League.”
Dev can be heard saying, “In December, I am traveling to Bangladesh together with prime minister Sheikh Hasina. On behalf of the BJP” — the Bharatiya Janata Party, India’s ruling Hindu nationalist party — “we will carry a message of democracy and development on this journey. This visit will further strengthen the relationship between our two countries, inshallah.”
As of the time this report was published, the post had been shared more than 200 times and had drawn more than 13,000 reactions.
A reverse image search on several keyframes from the video surfaced matching images on Picxy, a stock photo website. According to the caption on those images, the photographs show Dev — whose full name is Deepak Adhikari — speaking at a rally in Burdwan, a city in the Indian state of West Bengal, in support of Khokan Das, a candidate from the All India Trinamool Congress, a regional Indian political party.
A keyword search also located the original video of that speech on YouTube, uploaded in 2021. The video’s title reads, “Dev’s public rally in support of Trinamool Congress candidate Khokan Das from Burdwan Dakshin constituency.” Dev’s clothing, the scarf around his neck, his wristwatch and the way he holds the microphone are identical in both videos. In this original video, Dev makes no mention of Bangladesh or of Sheikh Hasina. Instead, he speaks about online classes for students during the coronavirus lockdown and about various initiatives undertaken by the Trinamool Congress.
To confirm these findings, the video was further tested using multiple deepfake-detection tools, including Hiya, Hive Moderation and Resemble AI. Results from all of the tools indicated that the audio in the video had been artificially generated.
In conclusion, the video showing Dev appear to say he is traveling to Bangladesh with Sheikh Hasina has been edited using artificial intelligence.
All social media captions, quotations, and news excerpts in this article have been translated into English from the languages in which they were originally posted or published.
