Elizabeth Warren didn’t say Republicans shouldn’t vote, despite deepfake

U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren did not say Republicans should be restricted from voting in the 2024 presidential election, despite what a recent deepfake video making the rounds on social media appears to show.

The altered video, made with a clip from an MSNBC interview with the Democrat in December, purports to show Warren stating allowing Republicans to vote could threaten election integrity — a statement she never made.

The video, which was confirmed to have been made using artificial intelligence technology, garnered about 189,000 views on Twitter in a week’s time, according to Newsweek, which reports the clip appears to have originated on TikTok.

Warren’s office did not immediately return a request for comment Thursday morning.

In the original clip from Dec. 14, Warren told MSNBC that Republicans have campaigned on the idea that government is ineffective.

She did not make statements about suppressing or restricting Republican voters from casting their ballots.

“For so long, Republicans have run on the notion that government’s bad, government’s terrible, at best government is inept, at worst it’s really actually doing harm,” Warren said. “We’re out there demonstrating exactly the opposite, we are showing that government can be on your side.”

So-called deepfake videos are a type of synthetic media that swaps one person’s likeness for another’s to manipulate audio, images, and video. They have become a staple method for bad actors spreading disinformation online, and experts say the number of them has grown exponentially in recent years.