US presidential candidate Donald Trump has used fake images to solicit the votes of fans of pop star Taylor Swift. On Sunday (local time), the former president shared a fake poster on his online service Truth Social in which the singer calls on her followers to vote for Trump. Other obviously manipulated images showed women in T-shirts with the words “Swifties for Trump”.
According to experts, some of the images were created using artificial intelligence (AI). The singer’s poster was either “AI-generated or simply manipulated in a classic way,” Hany Farid, an expert in digital forensics at the University of California, told the AFP news agency. Trump’s post was “particularly insidious” because at least one of the fan images actually looks real, he added.
Swift herself has not yet publicly supported Donald Trump or the Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. However, she has repeatedly criticized Trump in the past, and before the 2020 presidential election she campaigned for the current US President Joe Biden. She also supports abortion rights 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.
