A campaign using artificial intelligence to impersonate Omar al-Bashir, the former leader of Sudan, has received hundreds of thousands of views on TikTok, adding online confusion to a country torn apart by civil war. An anonymous account has been posting what it says are "leaked recordings" of the ex-president since late August. The channel has posted dozens of clips - but the voice is fake. Bashir, who has been accused of organising war crimes and was toppled by the military in 2019, hasn't been seen in public for a year and is believed to be seriously ill. He denies the war crimes accusations.
Campaigns like this are significant as they show how new tools can distribute fake content quickly and cheaply through social media, experts say. The democratisation of access to sophisticated audio and video manipulation technology has me most worried, as the average person with little to no technical expertise can quickly and easily create fake content.
The recordings are posted on a channel called The Voice of Sudan, which appears to be a mixture of old clips from press conferences during coups attempts, news reports, and several "leaked recordings" attributed to Bashir. The posts often pretend to be taken from a meeting or phone conversation, and sound grainy as you might expect from a bad telephone line.
To check their authenticity, a team of Sudan experts at BBC Monitoring consulted a team of Sudan experts. Ibrahim Haithar told them they weren't likely to be recent: "The voice sounds like Bashir but he has been very ill for the past few years and doubt he would be able to speak so clearly." However, this doesn't mean it's not him.
The most conclusive piece of evidence came from a user on X, formerly Twitter. They recognized the very first of the Bashir recordings posted in August 2023. It apparently features the leader criticising the commander of the Sudanese army, General Abdel Fattah Burhan. The recording matched a Facebook Live broadcast aired two days earlier by a popular Sudanese political commentator, known as Al Insirafi.
The Voice of Sudan denies misleading the public and says they are not affiliated with any groups. AI experts have long been concerned that fake video and audio will lead to a wave of disinformation with the potential to spark unrest and disrupt elections.
