Is Photo of Donald Trump 'Dancing With 13-Year-Old' Girl Real?

An image featuring Donald Trump and a young-looking girl dancing with him has been spreading on Twitter and TikTok over the past few days, sparking skepticism about its authenticity.

With a trickle of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-generated misinformation quickly turning into a powerful stream merely months after new machine-learning tools such as ChatGPT and Midjourney became widely accessible to the public.

While the image in itself did not show anything untoward, some of the posts captioned it with lewd comments and baseless accusations against the former president. But is the photo in fact real, or another AI hoax?

Newsweek Misinformation Watch assessed the evidence.

The photo purportedly showing Trump dancing with a young girl was shared in dozens of tweets—mostly with low engagement—but accumulated more than 100,000 views in total. It surfaced on other platforms including TikTok, as well.

Many of the posts were shared in comments and replies to other tweets, including those in other languages, making them harder for fact-checkers to track and verify.

One such post came in the form of a reply to Donald Trump Jr., the former president's son.

Some posts misleadingly framed the image within a narrative of assault allegations from 2016. A woman in California had sued Trump for an alleged attack, claiming the then-presidential hopeful raped her at a party in New York in 1994.

She filed a lawsuit in Manhattan Federal Court in June 2016, but canceled plans to "break her silence" minutes before the press conference, citing death threats as the reason. The lawsuit was eventually dropped after the judge ruled that the complaint didn't raise valid claims under federal law. Trump dismissed the accusations as "categorically untrue."

"Was it this 13yro," said a tweet in response to a post referencing the case, receiving nearly 40,000 views.

Some of the posts used the plain image, while others shared a meme version that included the caption:

"Photo of Donald Trump at Epstein's private island. Dancing with a 13 year old girl. Trump was in his 50s when this photo was taken. What kind of man does that?"

While the image does look convincing and could easily pass for a normal photo, upon closer inspection it appears to be a deepfake, with several telltale signs of AI manipulation apparent under scrutiny.

Firstly, Trump's and the girl's eyes and teeth—features that AI image-generating software typically struggle with—look far less convincing when zooming in with forensic tools. The girl's teeth appear to have no gaps, while both persons' eyes seem unfocused. Trump's are a different color from the blue eyes that can be seen in real photos.

Another giveaway is the ultra-smooth skin texture, and mismatch in skin coloration (the girl's face and arms, for example).

Anatomical anomalies are also seen in people in the background of the image, including the woman's warped ear in the right part of the image, or the six-fingered hand of the man holding a glass in the background.

Digits and body parts, especially in the background, are another element that is typically hard to generate convincingly.

For more information on how to spot deepfake and what signs to look out for, see Newsweek's detailed guide.

While the earliest iteration of the image found by Newsweek is dated April 24, 2023, reverse image searches did not surface any other or older versions of a photo that would appear to be at least several decades old.

Newsweek ran the image through AI testing software, including AIorNot and Illuminarty, both of which gave a high probability of its origin being AI. The latter assessed the photo to have artificial origins with a 65 percent probability.

Ben Colman, Co-Founder and CEO of Reality Defender, an AI-driven platform that specialises in deepfake and digitally-manipulated content detection, told Newsweek via email that the picture was both a diffusion image and a likely faceswap.

Other fact-checkers, including the BBC's Shayan Sardarizadeh, also indicated the high likelihood of the image being a deepfake, even as it has not yet been labeled as such by Twitter or via Community Notes.

Newsweek reached out to Donald Trump's representatives and a deepfake expert via email for comment.

The proliferation of deepfakes and AI-generated content has exploded in recent months, posing a major threat to the upcoming 2024 elections.

Trump, who became the first former president in history to face federal criminal charges in the classified documents case, has been both the source and the target of such digitally manipulated content.

He remains the firm favorite in the race to become the Republican candidate, though recent polls suggest that his main challenger, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, is gaining some ground.