A video on TikTok claiming to show a phone call between Sir Keir Starmer and US president-elect Donald Trump has been seen nearly a million times. In the 19-second video, a voice that sounds like Mr Trump is heard listing “things I don’t like when talking to me” rather than engaging with the Prime Minister.
Evaluation
The video has been manipulated by editing together shots of Sir Keir from an official Downing Street video and adding audio of an uncertain origin that sounds like Mr Trump.
The facts
Sir Keir Starmer has publicly congratulated Donald Trump on his victory in the 2024 US presidential election. It is traditional for world leaders to offer congratulations by phone after an election victory, with Sir Keir speaking to Mr Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden shortly after Labour’s own general election win in July.
Downing Street confirmed Sir Keir spoke to Mr Trump “this evening” in an announcement posted on the Government’s official website on November 6.
The TikTok video was posted before this phone call was made, with a tool developed by the investigative journalism collective Bellingcat revealing it was posted at 22:34:28 GMT on November 5. Not only was this before the Prime Minister made a call, it was approximately 12 hours before news organisations started to declare Mr Trump the winner.
The footage and audio of Sir Keir matches a video posted by 10 Downing Street to YouTube in August, showing the Prime Minister calling members of the British Paralympics team. The greeting “It’s Keir here”, which appears at the start of the TikTok video, is visible and audible nine seconds in, following by “just wanted to chat to you before you go out to the Paralympics”. This latter phrase is also in the TikTok video with the last word removed abruptly.
The rest of the manipulated TikTok video is comprised of edited shots from the same video without the matching audio, until the end when Sir Keir puts the phone down, as is seen towards the end of the original footage.
The audio of Mr Trump appears to be identical to other videos on TikTok, including some posted in August and September. Although both begin with (different) footage of Mr Trump speaking, his mouth does not match the words and the videos then cut away to other visuals. It is possible the audio has been generated by AI.
Links
Original TikTok post (archived)
Keir Starmer | Congratulations President-elect… | Instagram (archived)
Prime Minister Keir Starmer speaks with President Joe Biden – YouTube (archived)
PM call with President-elect Trump: 6 November 2024 – GOV.UK (archived)
The Associated Press post on X (archived)
Prime Minister Keir Starmer calls Paralympic athletes – YouTube (archived)
Tiktok date extractor (archived)
GitHub – bellingcat/tiktok-timestamp: A tiny client side tool that retrieves the timestamp from Tiktok videos (archived)
