Description: A reported viral video circulated in Nigeria in the late summer and early fall of 2023 falsely claiming that President Bola Tinubu announced plans to replace the naira with the U.S. dollar. The video, reportedly styled as a news segment from Arise News, was allegedly digitally altered using AI-generated audio and lip-sync manipulation. Arise News publicly denounced the clip as a deepfake, and no legitimate media sources corroborated the claim. The video appeared amid public anxiety over Nigeria's ongoing currency crisis.
Editor Notes: Timeline notes: The earliest remaining Facebook URL (that is currently known) is dated August 29, 2023. Africa Check performed its fact check on this video on October 16, 2023. The incident was included in the database on April 21, 2025.
Entities
View all entitiesAlleged: Unknown deepfake technology developer and Unknown voice cloning technology developer developed an AI system deployed by Unknown actors, which harmed Bola Tinubu , General public of Nigeria and Media integrity.
Alleged implicated AI systems: Unknown deepfake technology apps and Unknown voice cloning technology
Incident Stats
Incident ID
1032
Report Count
1
Incident Date
2023-08-29
Editors
Daniel Atherton
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline
IN SHORT: In 2023, Nigeria's currency faced several crises, from the shortage of the national currency to its drop at the international market. But claims that president Bola Tinubu replaced the naira with the dollar are false.
In 2022, the…
Variants
A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.
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