AP Photo/John Bazemore

Bérénice Roicivil rights leader’s youngest child Martin Luther King Jr.strongly denounced a deepfake video of his father that went viral after being shared by supporters of the former president. Donald Trump in the last days before the elections.

The video appears to have been initially shared in February by an account on the platform formerly known as Twitter that describes itself as part of the “Dilley Meme Team: Trump’s Online War Machine.”

“If Martin Luther King Jr. were alive today, he would support President Trump,” the @ramble_rants account tweeted, along with the nearly three-minute video that shows MLK appearing to criticize Democrats and urge the public to support Trump.

“We have been told time and time again that we cannot vote for the man who has done more for the black community than any other president,” says the fake king, imitating the voice of the civil rights leader assassinated for start the video. “If a black man dares to speak out in support of Donald Trump, a Democrat is always there to call the man an Uncle Tom, a house nigger, or worse. »

The video was shared again on Sunday by another pro-Trump account called @MAGAResource, along with a similar caption claiming it depicted what MLK would say “if he could speak today.”

The original post of the video was viewed about 70,000 times, according to data posted on the @ramble_rants tweet, but the one posted by @MAGAResource went much more viral, accumulating more than 10.2 million views at the time of posting .

Unsurprisingly, the video received many very critical responses, denouncing both the use of deepfake videos in general, but especially the use of technology to falsify support for MLK in particular.

Bernice King, who was just 5 years old when her father was murdered in Memphis in 1968, had sharp words about the video in her own post Monday.

“Delete this,” she wrote. “This is despicable, wrong, irresponsible and does not at all reflect what my father would say. And you didn’t think about our family.

More than five hours after Bernice King’s post, the video remains online, although a community note was attached to @MAGAResource’s tweet stating that the video “is a deepfake/digitally altered and could be misleading,” and that King had requested that it be published. be dismantled.

Screenshot via X.

Meanwhile, the @ramble_rants account posted another tweet about the video, linking to the viral @MAGAResource post and urging followers to “please downvote this bullshit community note because it misses the point and isn’t necessary” . Brendan Dilleywho tweets under the username @WarlordDilley as another member of this “Dilley Meme Team”, was also unrepentant, boasting about the millions of views the video had received and mocking King for criticizing the appropriation of the image of his murdered father.

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