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Donald Trump supporters have been creating and sharing AI-generated fake images of black voters to encourage African Americans to vote Republican.
BBC Panorama discovered dozens of deepfakes portraying black people as supporting the former president.
Mr. Trump has openly courted black voters, who were key to Joe Biden's election win in 2020.
But there's no evidence directly linking these images to Mr. Trump's campaign.
The co-founder of Black Voters Matter, a group which encourages black people to vote, said the manipulated images were pushing a “strategic narrative” designed to show Mr. Trump as popular in the black community.
A creator of one of the images told the BBC: “I'm not claiming it's accurate.”
The fake images of black Trump supporters, generated by artificial intelligence (AI), are one of the emerging disinformation trends ahead of the US presidential election in November.
Unlike in 2016, when there was evidence of foreign influence campaigns, the AI-generated images found by the BBC appear to have been made and shared by US voters themselves.
One of them was Mark Kaye and his team at a conservative radio show in Florida.
They created an image of Mr. Trump smiling with his arms around a group of black women at a party and shared it on Facebook, where Mr. Kaye has more than one million followers.
At first it looks real, but on closer inspection everyone's skin is a little too shiny and there are missing fingers on people's hands - some tell-tale signs of AI-created images.
“I'm not a photojournalist,” Mr. Kaye tells me from his radio studio. “I'm not out there taking pictures of what's really happening. I'm a storyteller.”
Disinformation tactics in the US presidential elections have evolved since 2016, when Donald Trump won. Back then, there were documented attempts by hostile foreign powers, such as Russia, to use networks of inauthentic accounts to try to sow division and plant particular ideas.
In 2020, the focus was on home-grown disinformation - particularly false narratives that the presidential election was stolen, which were shared widely by US-based social media users and endorsed by Mr. Trump and other Republican politicians.
In 2024, experts warn of a dangerous combination of the two.
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