Claim: Photos show former US president Donald Trump being arrested in New York.
Fact: The photos doing the rounds on social media are not real. It was generated by Bellingcat’s founder Eliot Higgins using the Artificial Intelligence (AI) art tool Midjourney.
Fact or Fiction?
On 21 March 2023, Twitter user @yoncecapital posted a photo claiming that it shows former US president Donald Trump being arrested in New York.
The proliferation of the claim can be linked to Trump’s post on Truth Social Saturday — a social media platform created by the Trump Media & Technology Group — that he had expected to be arrested on 21 March in Manhattan in connection with charges against him for allegedly falsifying business records during his 2016 presidential campaign.
Soch Fact Check searched Google with relevant keywords and came across this article by The Washington Post. The article states that Eliot Higgins, the founder of the open-source investigative outlet Bellingcat, created these images going viral on social media. He depicted the expected indictment of Trump through an AI art generator, Midjourney, by giving it simple prompts.
Higgins had initially tweeted two images on Twitter on 21 March with the caption, “Making pictures of Trump getting arrested while waiting for Trump’s arrest.” He posted more such photos in the same thread.
BBC News pointed out that the viral AI-generated images of Trump look hyper-real and have inconsistencies like an arm appearing too short, unnatural skin tones and faces with blurred-out features and inaccurate depiction of eyes.
On 30 March 2023, Trump was indicted in relation to the New York investigation. Trump’s lawyer, Joe Tacopina, told the media that the former president expects to be arrested and called to court to answer charges in Manhattan on 2 April.
Virality:
The claim was found here, here, here and here on Twitter. Content warning by readers stating that Donald Trump has not been arrested and these images are AI-generated was added to some posts on the platform.
Higgins’ tweet has been viewed by 6.3 million people. It gained significant traction with 40,200 likes, 5,379 retweets and 3,084 bookmarks.
On Facebook, the photos were shared here, here, here, here, here, here and here.
Conclusion: Donald Trump’s arrest photos have been wrongly shared as real. The photos were generated by the artificial intelligence program, Midjourney. The former US president has been indicted but not arrested yet in relation to an investigation.