An audio clip records Joe Biden saying he “removed Imran Khan from power because he was not carrying USA interests”.
This audio clip is not genuine. Experts say it’s likely to have been digitally created or possibly made using artificial intelligence. Full Fact could not find any evidence or reports of Mr Biden ever actually saying this.
An audio clip is being shared online with claims it features US President Joe Biden saying he “removed” a former president of Pakistan, Imran Khan, from power. But it’s not a real recording.
In the audio clip, Mr Biden supposedly says: “We know Pakistan has most corrupt leadership in Pakistan and let me tell you it favours American. We have removed Imran Khan from power because he was not carrying USA interests.
“When I became president, I never called Imran Khan and decided very early that we will remove Imran Khan. We took Pakistan Army Chief on board and given him clear instructions and he, I tell you, he had no other choice [sic].”
The audio clip appears to refer to reports in August 2021 that President Biden had not yet spoken to Mr Khan on the phone after taking office that January.
However, this is not authentic—it’s likely to have been digitally edited or possibly made using artificial intelligence. Full Fact could find no evidence or reports of Mr Biden ever actually saying this.
The audio clip has been shared widely across social media—including Facebook, Instagram and TikTok—with the caption: “US President admits they took Pak [Pakistan] Army Chief on board to remove Imran Khan!” It is accompanied by a slideshow of photos featuring Mr Biden and Mr Khan. There are also multiple posts sharing the audio clip with similar captions in Urdu.
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The alleged recording has clear signs of being inauthentic audio, including incorrect grammar and phraseology and unusual cadence.
Dr Dominic Lees, convenor of the University of Reading’s Synthetic Media Research Network, told Full Fact the audio was “clearly fake”.
He said: “Phraseology used is non-typical for the US President and there are obvious English language errors, for instance the phrase, ‘he was not carrying USA interests’. This indicates that a voice clone of Biden has been created, and made to ‘speak’ the text that has been written by the faker.
He added: “A further indication that this is a voice clone is the use of background music throughout, frequently a technique by fakers used to hide the sound imperfections in their work.”
Professor of Linguistics and Phonetics at the University of York’s Department of Language and Linguistics Science Dr Paul Foulkes similarly told fact checkers at Pakistani organisation Soch Fact Check that “the linguistic and phonetic information reveals that this is clearly not an authentic recording”.
He said the repetition in sentences “We know Pakistan has most corrupt leadership in Pakistan” and “I never called Imran Khan and decided very early that we’ll remove Imran Khan”, as well as missing articles (such as ‘a’ or ‘the’) in certain phrases, makes them “semantically and/or syntactically incoherent and extremely unlikely to be produced by a speaker of standard English”.
While we can be confident the audio is not genuine, there are several ways of creating inauthentic audio, and so it’s hard to say with absolute certainty how it was made. We’ve previously written about examples of inauthentic audio that were almost certainly deepfakes made with AI, but it’s also possible to create fake audio in other ways, for example, we’ve seen posts that used an impressionist’s voice.
The human rights nonprofit WITNESS’s Deepfakes Rapid Response Force reportedly said their analysis of the clip suggests it is not likely to be a deepfake, but rather the “poor grammar and unnatural cadence” point to it being “spliced and edited”. They added that the background music makes it hard to say this for certain.
However, Professor Hany Farid, whose research at UC Berkeley has focused on detecting deepfakes and AI voice clones, said “I’ve analyzed this audio with a model we trained to distinguish real from AI-generated voices. This model classifies this record as AI-generated. In addition, this audio has the tell-tale signs of being AI-generated in terms of cadence and intonation.”
There are several online tools that claim to be able to tell whether an audio clip was generated using AI. However, at the time of writing, we don’t quote these tools in our articles because we’ve found they don’t work consistently. You can find out more about identifying AI-generated video and audio in our guide.
Imran Khan was elected as Pakistan’s Prime Minister in 2018 but was removed from office following a parliamentary vote of no confidence in April 2022. At the time, Mr Khan claimed without evidence that there’d been a US-led plot involving his political opponents and the Pakistani military to oust him, which all parties denied.
He later dropped these allegations against the US, but continued to blame the former army chief Qamar Javed Bajwa for his ousting.
After being removed from office, Mr Khan was sentenced to three years in prison in August 2023 on charges of corruption and was disqualified from politics for five years. He has since been handed further jail time.
Full Fact has not investigated whether or not the US had anything to do with Mr Khan’s removal, only the authenticity of the audio clip circulating on social media.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because this is not an authentic audio clip. It’s likely to have been digitally edited or possibly made using artificial intelligence. Full Fact could find no evidence or reports of Mr Biden ever actually saying this.
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