Former President Donald Trump shared an AI-generated image falsely claiming that Taylor Swift fans were supporting his campaign.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump shared screenshots of four posts from X, which purportedly show young women wearing various styles of “Swifties for Trump” T-shirts. One of the screenshots claims that Swifties are now supporting Trump after Taylor Swift canceled a concert in Vienna due to safety concerns. Another image included the phrase, “Taylor wants you to vote for Donald Trump.”
“I accept!” Trump captioned the post.
But Trump’s posts included a mix of real and AI-generated images, falsely suggesting a widespread, coordinated movement of “pro-Trump Swifties.” Using a tool created by nonprofit True Media to detect the spread of election-related deepfakes, WIRED found that many of the images shared by Trump showed “substantial evidence of manipulation.”
One of the screenshots shared by Trump was from an anonymous pro-Trump account with over 300,000 followers that regularly posts AI-generated images. The account posted about “Swifties for Trump” and then shared a follow-up post calling the original Swifties for Trump post “satire.”
While the “Swifties for Trump” campaign activity appears to be sluggish, the “Swifties for Harris” group is active. “We don’t represent all Swifties, but we think there’s reason to believe that you don’t need an AI to show your support for Kamala,” Swifties4Harris co-founder Eileen Kim told WIRED.
At least one Swiftie supports Trump: Among the images Trump shared on Truth Social on Sunday was an actual photo of Jenna Piwowarczyk, who attended a Trump rally in Racine, Wisconsin, in June wearing a homemade T-shirt that read “Swifty for Trump.” Piwowarczyk now sells her handmade T-shirts on Etsy.
Trump has consistently shared AI-generated imagery. Last week, he falsely claimed that Harris’ campaign was using AI to artificially inflate crowd sizes at her rallies, and over the weekend he posted an AI-generated image on X of Harris speaking at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, with a Soviet flag raised above a crowd.
Disinformation experts have warned about the threat that generative AI tools pose to election integrity, and already this year WIRED has tracked dozens of examples of content created using generative AI in elections around the world.
Swift has never publicly endorsed a presidential candidate, but she did back President Joe Biden in 2020. She has also been a strong critic of Trump. After Trump infamously said “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” in 2020 in response to the Black Lives Matter protests in support of George Floyd, the pop superstar slammed the then-president for having the “nerve to feign moral superiority” when he’s “stoked the fires of white supremacy and racism throughout his presidency.”
