Taylor Swift is one of the most influential women in the world. Donald Trump knows this and is trying to win over her fans – using very questionable means.
US presidential candidate Donald Trump has posted fake pictures of pop star Taylor Swift in an attempt to get her fans to vote for him in the November election. On his online service Truth Social, Trump shared a fake “Uncle Sam” poster with Swift’s face on it, which read: “Taylor wants you to vote for Donald Trump.” Trump wrote: “I accept!”
The poster with the singer was either “AI-generated or simply manipulated in a classic way,” Hany Farid, a digital forensics expert at the University of California, told the AFP news agency.
Author confirms fake Taylor Swift photos
Other blatantly doctored images showed women wearing T-shirts that read “Swifties for Trump.” While two of the images shared by the former president show a real woman supporting Trump, most of the women depicted are not real, but representations of people created using artificial intelligence.
The images shared by Trump were originally posted by pro-Trump accounts on X. One of these accounts also posted several tutorials on how to use generative AI tools on its Substack blog. In a response to X, the same account confirmed that the images Trump posted of him were generated by AI. Farid criticized Trump’s post as “particularly sneaky” because at least one of the fan images actually looks real.
Pop star has not yet clearly positioned himself
Swift herself has not yet publicly supported Donald Trump or the Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. In the past, however, she has repeatedly criticized Trump, and before the 2020 presidential election she campaigned for the current US President Joe Biden. She also supports abortion and LGBTQ rights, where the English acronym LGBTQ stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer.
Although the singer has not yet made a public statement, tens of thousands of her fans have already spoken out in favor of the Democratic candidate. The page “Swifties for Kamala” has tens of thousands of subscribers on online services such as X (formerly Twitter), Facebook and Instagram. There are similar pages under the name “Swifties for Trump” – but with significantly fewer followers.
The new images are part of a social media campaign that some pro-Trump accounts started over the weekend to suggest that more and more of Swift’s fans were supporting Trump. In fact, there is no evidence of this.
Sources: AFP, NBC News, CNN
