20-05-2025
Video of Trump saying Africa's mineral resources belong to US is fabricated
'Burkina Faso President Ibrahim Traore./Donald Trump wahala wahala (sic),' reads the caption of a video shared on Facebook.
A block of text over the clip reads: 'Breaking News: Trump says all mineral in Africa belongs to the U.S! Africa, let's unite and fight this'.
The video has been shared more than 6,000 times since it was published on May 10, 2025.
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Screenshot of a Facebook post with the altered clip taken on May 15, 2025
'Ibrahim Traore of Burkina Faso is becoming a traitor, and I can't sit back. I watch him unite Africa because the unity of Africa will make our children to travel (sic) to Africa for greener pasture in the nearest future. Hiding in Russia won't save you; all that can save you is to listen to the demand of USA or France,' Trump appears to say in the clip.
"No African country should be ruled by military slash African mineral resources belong to us," he added.
However, these were not words spoken by Trump. The video was altered using artificial intelligence (AI) tools.
Altered audio
The first clue that the video had been tampered with, is that the words are not in sync with the movement of Trump's lips.
Secondly, the language in the clip sounds unnatural and some parts are grammatically incorrect such as "make our children to travel to Africa" rather than "make our children travel to Africa".
At one point, Trump appears to read out a punctuation mark - saying slash (/) - when he purportedly states: 'No African country should be ruled by military slash African mineral resources belong to us.'
This would not happen in natural speech or if a person was reading from a script.
A reverse image search using keyframes extracted from the video led to a clip posted on a YouTube account on September 4, 2024 (archived here), in which Trump is heard calling on people to vote in the presidential election.
A keyword search based on information from the video then showed that the same clip was also posted on Trump's verified Instagram and TikTok pages on the same day in September 2024 (archived here and here).
This was two months before the US presidential election held in November of the same year.
Several similarities can be noticed between the original video and the altered video, including the US flag to the right of Trump, the building visible through the window and his unbuttoned shirt collar.
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Screenshot showing the similarities between the original YouTube video (left) and the altered Facebook video
In the 27-second clip, Trump called on his supporters to participate in the election to "save" the US.
For the duration of the video, he does not mention Traore, Africa or mineral resources.
AFP Fact Check extracted the audio from the altered clip and ran it through – an audio tool that looks for specific forensic traces left by voice generators.
The result showed a 99 percent probability that the audio was generated with an AI tool.
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Screenshot of the detection result interface, taken on May 15, 2025
Burkina Faso's military leader Traore swept into power following a coup in September 2022 amid growing anti-French sentiments in the Sahel region (archived here).
Traore is a frequent topic of viral social media posts in which supporters cast him in a positive light, but observers say his online rise has been accompanied by a flood of misleading and false claims.
Both Trump and Traore have been the subject of altered videos shared online, including recent examples here and here.
More AFP fact-checks related to artificial intelligence can be found here.
