Trump posts fake images showing Swift's support

Move an apparent bid to tap singer’s huge star power as US presidential race heats up

- 

Donald Trump has shared doctored images showing Taylor Swift and her fans supporting his presidential campaign, in an apparent bid to tap the singer's megastar power in the US election.

Swift has not yet publicly thrown her weight behind any presidential candidate in the Nov 5 election, but she backed President Joe Biden in 2020 and has previously been critical of Trump.

On Aug 18, Trump shared screenshots of posts with the manipulated images - including some that an expert said appeared to be generated using artificial intelligence (AI) - suggesting that the pop star and her fans, popularly known as Swifties, support his campaign.

In a post on his social media site Truth Social, which included an image of Swift clad in an Uncle Sam outfit and instructing her fans to vote for Trump, the former president wrote: "I accept!"

That image, in the style of a poster, is either "Al-generated or just classically manipulated", Professor Hany Farid, a digital forensics expert at the University of California, Berkeley, told AFP.