Video not of Trump criticising Ugandan youth abductions
IN SHORT: A viral TikTok video appears to show US president Donald Trump speaking about the abduction of young people in Uganda. But the video uses AI-generated audio to create a fake speech.
A TikTok video appears to show US president Donald Trump criticising the abduction of young people in Uganda during a speech.
He says:
Recent reports from Uganda highlight an alarming trend: disappearances and abductions targeting the youth. Let me be clear; no government should ever silence its youth or subject them to fear and oppression. This is not leadership. The world is watching. The youths of Uganda deserve peace, freedom, and a government that listens to them. You are the change makers, the dreamers who will change the future of your country.
It is followed by applause.
The bottom part of the video shows a Facebook post by Ugandan opposition leader Bobi Wine, in which he says that his home is being patrolled by "strange men in civilian clothes who appear to be armed". He then blames Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni and his son for any harm that may come to him.
The video also shows images of missing members of Wine's party, the National Unity Platform (NUP), and footage of armed officers outside an NUP building. The video's caption reads: "The president of USA Donald [Trump] has said the world is watching Museveni. Uganda, we need change."
The same Trump footage appears on other videos on Facebook. Together, the videos have over 530,000 views, and thousands of comments.
The context
Wine is a Ugandan opposition politician who leads the NUP, a major opposition party in Uganda. He is a strong critic of Museveni. Recently, Wine posted on social media that his house was being watched by unidentified armed men. He blamed the action on threats from Museveni's son, Gen Muhoozi Kainerugaba.
Kainerugaba is known for making highly controversial social media posts, some of which he later deletes. For example, in January 2025, he posted on X that opposition figure Kizza Besigye would be hanged. He has published a number of other controversial posts.
In February, the NUP reported that many of its party's supporters had recently been abducted.
But did Trump really talk about the abduction of young people in Uganda, as this footage claims? We checked.
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Video is altered
A closer look at the video shows that Trump's lips are not in sync with the audio. Although the voice sounds like Trump's, it is likely generated using artificial intelligence (AI) tools.
A keyword search found no credible reports of Trump giving such a speech. If the speech were real, it would have been widely reported in the US and Ugandan media and by other credible sources. But there was no such coverage.
A reverse image search of keyframes from the video led to this footage of Trump's joint press conference with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on 5 February 2025.
The fake video was most likely created by editing parts of this footage. In this conference, Trump discussed issues relating to the Middle East and did not mention Uganda.
Furthermore, the speech about abductions of young people is identical to parts of a previously debunked video in which Trump criticised abductions in Kenya.
A change in Trump's voice can be heard whenever he says "Uganda", suggesting that the word "Kenya" was swapped with "Uganda". This appears to prove that the same fake audio was reused with different footage. It also confirms that the video was created by superimposing AI-generated audio over real footage of Trump.
The claim that the video shows Trump publicly criticising the abduction of young people in Uganda is false.
