No evidence put forward by media or ministers for concluding alleged audio of Starmer abusing intern is fake, but social media giant removes earlier warning that quoted Tory minister
The UK’s media are falling over themselves in haste to state as fact that the audio that emerged yesterday, allegedly showing Keir Starmer swearing at an intern and moaning about how much he hates Liverpool, is fake. Sky News, for example, headlines with a statement that the audio is a deepfake – no quotation marks are used, which signifies a statement of fact rather than quoting a claim or opinion. The article provides no expert technical analysis or opinion to support this statement, but repeats throughout that it is fake, using this to support Establishment attacks on freedom of information under the guise of ‘protecting’ democracy.
To manufacture a semblance of support for the claim that it is fake, Sky resorts to using the example of a Slovakian politician and journalist who were accused of discussing how to rig a Slovakian election. However, while analysis by AFP suggested that recording was fake, no such analysis is quoted by Sky or other media for concluding that the Starmer audio was fake too.
Interestingly, the Slovakian journalist did not say that her words had been fabricated out of nothing, but rather that they were her words but not in the order she’d said them:
On that basis, if the Slovakian example is supposed to protect Starmer, it would mean that someone had a recording of him saying ‘f***ing’, ‘moron’, ‘idiot’ and more in various tonalities, to combine them into the damning recording.
On the contrary, when Skwawkbox and others – unlike the ‘MSM’ – actually did some analysis and ran the audio clips through a platform that detects AI voices, the clips rated as highly as 97% likely not to be AI-generated, but to be of human origin (despite wags who suggested that this proves it wasn’t Starmer!).
And 35-year acoustics expert Kal Ross told Skwawkbox that he believes the audio is real – and last night he went further, saying that if it was faked it would be ‘Hollywood budget or state-actor level to achieve it’.
Interestingly, while the Twitter social media platform was quick to attach a ‘content warning’ to the tweeted audio quoting the UK’s security-service-aligned government minister Tom Tugendhat, who also rushed to dismiss the audio as fake, it has today removed that warning, suggesting that the platform’s own analysis does not lead it to conclude that the audio is fake:
And, when asked directly by Skwawkbox, in a formal press enquiry, to comment on the audio the Labour party did not deny it – and still has not as of this afternoon, more than twenty-four hours after the enquiry went in.
Are the media and the UK Establishment falling over themselves to get ahead of the scandal the recordings would represent, dismissing them instantly as ‘deepfake’, to protect the politician who has been described as a ‘long-time servant of the British security state’?
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