President Trump posted a racist video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, which was later deleted after widespread criticism including from Republican lawmakers.
President Trump posted a 62-second video on his social media platform Truth Social that included racist imagery portraying former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama as apes. The video was set to 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight' and was part of content promoting conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. The clip appeared to be spliced from AI-generated content that originally depicted various Democratic politicians as animals while showing Trump as a lion. The video was posted late Thursday night and remained up for approximately 12 hours before being deleted following widespread outrage. Republican lawmakers, including Senator Tim Scott and Representative Mike Lawler, publicly criticized the post and called for its removal. Trump claimed he only saw the beginning of the video about voter fraud and suggested he had given the link to someone else to post. The imagery perpetuated historical racist tropes used to dehumanize Black people. This incident was part of a pattern of Trump posting AI-generated memes and deepfakes on his Truth Social account, with previous incidents including doctored images of civil rights attorneys and AI-generated videos of political opponents.
Domain classification, causal taxonomy, severity scores, and national security assessments were LLM-classified and may contain errors.
AI that exposes users to harmful, abusive, unsafe or inappropriate content. May involve providing advice or encouraging action. Examples of toxic content include hate speech, violence, extremism, illegal acts, or child sexual abuse material, as well as content that violates community norms such as profanity, inflammatory political speech, or pornography.
Human
Due to a decision or action made by humans
Other
Without clearly specifying the intentionality
Post-deployment
Occurring after the AI model has been trained and deployed