Former President Donald Trump on Sunday falsely claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign lied about the crowd that turned out at his Aug. 7 rally in Detroit, Michigan. Trump said in a post on Truth Social that the photos of the crowd were created using artificial intelligence and that in reality the crowd “did not exist.”
But numerous videos of the event at Detroit Wayne County Metropolitan Airport show a large crowd in attendance, with the video showing a crowd similar to the one in the photo. A local reporter for the news site MLive estimated that 15,000 people were there when Air Force Two landed.
The photo Trump took issue with was posted to X by Harris' Michigan campaign staff, who Harris said she received it from a colleague. A Harris campaign official told CBS News that the photo was taken by a campaign staffer, who sent what they called the original photo along with other images they had taken.
A photo provided by the Harris campaign shows a crowd gathered at a rally for Vice President Kamala Harris and running mate Tim Walz at Detroit Wayne County Metropolitan Airport on Aug. 7, 2024. Photo courtesy of the Harris campaign.
Photo metadata analyzed by CBS News revealed that the photo was taken with an Apple iPhone 12 Pro Max at 6:28pm ET on August 7. A side-by-side comparison of the original photo and the version that appeared on social media showed that the social media version had been brightened and cropped, with no signs of AI manipulation.
Other news outlets covering the incident, including Reuters and Getty Images, captured similar photos, like this one below.
Air Force Two taxis down the runway carrying supporters awaiting a presidential campaign rally for Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris and her running mate, Michigan Governor Tim Walz, at Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport in Romulus, Michigan, on August 7, 2024. Adam J. Dewey/Anadolu via Getty Images
Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who specializes in deepfake detection, said in a LinkedIn post that he had received multiple requests to analyze the image after it went viral.
Farid said he found no evidence that the images were AI-generated or digitally altered. The signs and lettering on the planes don't show any of the typical signs of AI generation, he said.
The Harris campaign responded to Trump's accusations on Truth Social, replying to one of Trump's posts and sharing a video from the event that showed Air Force Two arriving: “@realdonaldtrump Remember? This is what a rally in a battleground state looks like.”
But Trump supporters on social media continued to share images that have since been debunked and spread the false claims.
One of the fake images posted on Telegram and X showed an AI-generated face with a caption that said it was a “fake Harris supporter” circulated by the Harris campaign. However, CBS News found that the photo was not circulated by the Harris campaign. An X user who runs a parody account claims to be behind the image and that it was generated using AI.
Screenshots of a Craigslist ad seeking paid actors to appear at a political event at the Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona, also circulated over the weekend. However, the ad is fake and has been debunked as such since at least 2017 by AZ Central, Snopes and Reuters.
Trump has bragged in recent days about the crowds he has seen at his rallies. The Republican presidential nominee said at a press conference on Thursday that he believed his speech on January 6, 2021, at the Ellipse near the White House drew more people than Martin Luther King Jr.'s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963.
Trump acknowledged that official estimates put the audience at King's speech at a much larger level. About 250,000 people attended the 1963 March on Washington, where King spoke, according to the National Park Service. About 53,000 people attended Trump's speech on January 6, 2021, according to the House Select Committee investigating the attack on the Capitol later that day.
“Nobody has ever addressed a larger audience than I have,” Trump said.
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