Modi Cheapfakes: Low-Tech Manipulation Spreads False Political Narratives

BOOM Live has repeatedly documented this pattern in Modi's own speeches: in one case it found a viral clip spliced together from two separate portions of a June 2023 Modi speech to make him appear to tell voters to "vote for Congress," when the unedited recording shows him urging a vote for the BJP ^[2].

In September 2026, NewsMeter traced a widely shared clip claiming Modi promised to "end poverty in one go" back to a longer April 2024 speech in which he was mocking a similar pledge attributed to Congress leader Rahul Gandhi — the clip inverted the meaning of what he actually said ^[3].

Newschecker and Factly separately traced a viral video appearing to show Modi disrespecting the national anthem back to unedited June 2025 footage from a public meeting in Siwan, Bihar, where no anthem played at all; the anthem audio had been added onto the clip afterward ^[4][5]. These cases share a signature: the underlying footage is real, but the picture, sound, or context has been rearranged to invert or fabricate what was said.

In each case above, fact-checkers worked the same way: reverse-searching keyframes from the viral clip to locate the original broadcast or official upload, then comparing the two side by side for cuts, added audio, or missing context ^[3][4].

Some clips also show visual tells — mismatched lip movements, audio that doesn't match the ambient sound of the room, or objects present in the original that vanish in the edited version — that fact-checkers use to confirm manipulation, sometimes running the clip through AI-detection tools as well when they suspect the edit goes beyond simple splicing ^[6].

Cheapfakes targeting Modi show that low-tech video and audio manipulation remains a persistent misinformation vector — and, per the most recent large-scale review of Indian election content, still a far more common one than AI deepfakes ^[1]. These techniques predate AI and remain effective because they're quick to produce, require no special skill, and can be harder to catch at a glance than an obvious deepfake. Always trace a political clip back to its original broadcast before sharing it.