Jake Horton, Shayan Sardarizadeh & Mike Wendling
BBC Verify
Published
Donald Trump has falsely claimed a crowd which gathered to see Vice President Kamala Harris speak in Michigan last week “didn’t exist” and an image showing it was AI generated.
The picture in question shows a large crowd at the Democratic presidential nominee's rally in Detroit.
Mr Trump, the Republican taking on the vice-president in November's election, said on his Truth Social platform, external that it was a fake and there was “nobody” there waiting for her.
However, in multiple other images and videos, some taken by people present but also by TV news teams and agency photographers, you can see a large crowd of people at the event.
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Multiple images show a large crowd
BBC presenter Sumi Somaskanda took the picture below at the rally and says: “People were literally packed in and the crowd stretched out onto the airfield.”
Image source, BBC News
Several of other photographs taken at the event by Getty Images, external show a large crowd there.
Video footage taken by several independent media organisations, including NBC News and PBS, show similar scenes.
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Local media outlet MLive covered the event and estimated that about 15,000 people, external were at the rally which was held at Detroit Metropolitan Airport.
Many people who were also there posted pictures on X which showed them in a big crowd, including a Michigan state Democrat lawmaker, external who said there were “throngs of people”.
Where did the image come from?
The first version we could find of the photo Mr Trump has highlighted was posted on X by a Harris campaign staffer, external, Bhavik Lathia, on 7 August.
Mr Lathia says the picture was sent to him by another campaign official.
The Harris campaign confirmed this and sent us what they say was the original photo below.
Image source, Harris Campaign
BBC Verify checked the metadata of this image, which confirmed it was taken on an iPhone 12 Pro Max device on 7 August at 18:28 local time.
“I can confirm that this was taken by Harris campaign staff and not modified by AI in any way,” a campaign official told the BBC.
The campaign also sent us several other images taken by the same person at the same spot, including the one below.
This image was taken a minute earlier from the same angle, in which the same crowd is visible but covered in shadow.
Image source, Harris Campaign
We’ve asked the Harris campaign whether the image which was questioned by Mr Trump was brightened to expose the crowds covered by shadow or changed in any other way.
There’s no evidence that the Harris campaign edited the image to make the crowd appear larger.
There have also been suggestions online that several elements of the photo show it has been manipulated using AI.
These include the absence of a crowd in a reflection on the side of the plane, and that there is no identification number on the plane’s tail.
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On the first point, other photos taken by news agencies show the same view in the reflection on the side of the plane without a visible crowd.
A Getty photograph taken from the reverse angle looking towards the crowd shows a clear area on the tarmac in front of the plane as Ms Harris and her running-mate Tim Walz walk away from it.
It is possible that the reflection on the side of the plane is mainly of this area of empty tarmac.
Image source, Getty Images
Questions have also been raised online about why there is no identification number on the tail of Air Force Two - the vice president’s plane.
However, the number is also absent from other pictures taken at the Detroit event, and footage of the plane, external at other events recently also show it without a number on its tail.
Prof Hany Farid, a specialist in image analysis at UC Berkeley, has examined the photograph using software designed to detect AI-generated images and says “we found no evidence that this image is AI-generated or digitally altered”.
Related Topics
- Kamala Harris
- US election 2024
- Donald Trump
- US politics
- United States
