An audio recording captures Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer complaining that he hates Liverpool.
There is no evidence that the clip is genuine. It may have been generated by artificial intelligence, though we don’t know that for sure.
A number of recent posts on Facebook and other social media sites have shared an audio clip which supposedly captures Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer swearing and saying that he hates the city of Liverpool. One such post on X (formerly Twitter) has thousands of shares and likes and over 400,000 views at the time of writing.
In the clip, a voice sounding like that of Mr Starmer is heard to say: “Why do we have to have conference here every single year… I fucking hate Liverpool.”
Versions of this clip have been in circulation since October 2023, when it emerged around the same time as the Labour party conference was taking place in Liverpool, alongside a similar likely fake clip of Mr Starmer apparently swearing at a member of his staff. We wrote about this at the time.
There is no evidence that either clip is genuine, as was reported in the media at the time.
We’ve not been able to determine whether the clip featuring comments about Liverpool was generated with artificial intelligence, edited in some other way or is of an impersonator, but we’ve not seen any evidence to suggest it is real.
Definitively proving that a non-specific and unattributed audio clip has been faked is difficult. The emergence of this clip and others like it last year exposed the increased challenges of verification posed by new technology and the challenge of ensuring an effective and proportionate response by social media platforms on such content.
We’ve not seen specific clues in the clip itself, such as identifiable background noise or names used, which would enable it to be definitively verified or proven a fake.
We have contacted the Labour party and will update this article if we receive a response. When we contacted the Labour party last year about the similar clip supposedly of Mr Starmer swearing at his staff, Labour did not officially comment but sources within the Labour party told us it was fake, as did senior Conservative politicians.
We’ve written previously about deepfakes and the challenges of verifying audio clips in our How to spot deepfake videos and AI audio guide.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because… there is no evidence that this recording is genuine.
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