Fact check: Student Leader, Rashed Iqbal Khan’s Viral Video About His Age Is A Deepfake

Claim: Rashed Iqbal Khan, the president of Bangladesh Chhatra Dal, has said that his age is 47.
Fact: The viral video of Rashed Iqbal Khan is AI-generated.

Recently, a video has gone viral on social media claiming that Rashed Iqbal Khan, the new president of Bangladesh Chhatra Dal, is 47 years old. See the videos here, here, here, and here. On August 8, 2023, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) announced Rashed Iqbal Khan as the new president of its student wing, Chhatra Dal. Later that day, a video purportedly showing Khan saying his age is 47 began circulating on social media. The video shows Rashed Iqbal Khan giving a speech in which he says, “I am Rashed Iqbal Khan, the new president of Bangladesh Chhatra Dal. I am only 47 years old. My eldest son, Tauheed, is 27 years old. Tauheed has an eight-year-old daughter. I am a classmate of Jubayda Rahman. Dear students, please call me uncle or grandfather, and pray for me.”See a screenshot below:

Newschecker has found the viral video is a deepfake and was created using Artificial Intelligence.

Fact check/Verification:

Using Google reverse image search, we were able to trace the origin video. The image of Khan was taken from his Facebook post which can be seen here.

Steps to verify the viral video:

Image search: Using Google reverse image search, we found the original image used in the video on Rashed Iqbal Khan’s Facebook id, which is unverified.
Watermark search: The viral video has a watermark that says “D-ID.” A keyword search found that this is an open-source AI-based video creation site that allows users to create short videos with any image.
Comparison with reliable sources: In an interview with Bangla Vision on August 10, Rashed Iqbal Khan said that he passed his SSC and HSC exams in 2003 and 2005, respectively. He first enrolled at Jagannath University and then at Dhaka University, where he graduated in history. In the interview, he also showed his national ID card,

which shows his date of birth as December 1, 1987. Therefore, he is 36 years old.

What is deepfake?

Deepfake is a portmanteau of “deep learning” and “fake.” It is also known as synthetic media. This technology allows users to create artificial images of a person and then easily manipulate them. Deepfake technology has been used for entertainment, spreading rumors and misinformation, and even for fraud.

Analysis of the viral video:

If you watch the viral video carefully, you will notice that it is not real. Here are some tips on how to spot deep fake videos:

Voice: If you pay attention to the voice in the video, you will notice that it sounds robotic, similar to Google’s text-to-speech engine. The speaker’s facial expressions do not match the words they are saying. To confirm this, you can visit this AI Voice Detector and upload the audio to check for free. You will also notice that there is no echo in the audio, which is only possible if there is a noise-canceling microphone in front of the speaker. However, there is no such microphone visible on or around the speaker.
Surrounding: If one were to observe the video closely, it would become apparent that, apart from the face of the person speaking, the rest of the scene is completely static. This is unusual, as people are typically not static in videos.
Facial expressions: You can notice that the lip movements of the person speaking in the video follow a certain pattern. Nothing is moving like the muscles of the face, eyeballs are supposed to move when a normal person is talking.
Overlay: A visual inspection of the viral video reveals that the speaker and the people in the back are on two separate layers, with a clear demarcation between the two. This suggests that the video was edited in two layers and merged in a suboptimal manner.
Lighting: Typically, when a person moves while talking, the light from different directions will cause different exposures to the camera’s face, resulting in different parts of the face being brighter at different times. However, this is not the case in the viral video, which appears to have a single light source from one side.

Deepfakes are videos that have been manipulated using artificial intelligence to make it appear as if someone is saying or doing something they did not actually say or do. The viral video is a deepfake and created in a rather more amateurish manner as there are several glitches evident in the video. If you are unsure whether a video is a deep fake, you can check it using a website like this one to clear your doubts

Conclusion:

The viral video of Rashed Iqbal Khan is an AI-generated deepfake video.

Result: False

Sources:
Bangla Vision, AI Voice Detector , using a website like this one.