#FactCheck - Viral Video Showing Man Frying Bhature on His Stomach Is AI-Generated
A video circulating on social media shows a man allegedly rolling out bhature on his stomach and then frying them in a pan. The clip is being shared with a communal narrative, with users making derogatory remarks while falsely linking the act to a particular community.
CyberPeace Foundation’s research found the viral claim to be false. Our probe confirms that the video is not real but has been created using artificial intelligence (AI) tools and is being shared online with a misleading and communal angle.
Claim
On January 5, 2025, several users shared the viral video on social media platform X (formerly Twitter). One such post carried a communal caption suggesting that the person shown in the video does not belong to a particular community and making offensive remarks about hygiene and food practices..
- The post link and archived version can be viewed here: https://x.com/RightsForMuslim/status/2008035811804291381
- Archive Link: https://archive.ph/lKnX5
Fact Check:
Upon closely examining the viral video, several visual inconsistencies and unnatural movements were observed, raising suspicion about its authenticity. These anomalies are commonly associated with AI-generated or digitally manipulated content.
To verify this, the video was analysed using the AI detection tool HIVE Moderation. According to the tool’s results, the video was found to be 97 percent AI-generated, strongly indicating that it was not recorded in real life but synthetically created.
Conclusion
CyberPeace Foundation’s research clearly establishes that the viral video is AI-generated and does not depict a real incident. The clip is being deliberately shared with a false and communal narrative to mislead users and spread misinformation on social media. Users are advised to exercise caution and verify content before sharing such sensational and divisive material online.
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Executive Summary
A video featuring Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath is being widely shared on social media. In the video, Adityanath can be heard saying, “Let me become the Prime Minister, and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir will also become a part of India.” The video also carries an on-screen text that reads “Next PM 2029.” By sharing this clip, social media users are claiming that Yogi Adityanath is set to become India’s Prime Minister in 2029.
However, CyberPeace research found the viral claim to be misleading. Our research revealed that the video circulating online has been edited and is being shared out of context. The original video dates back to May 2024. In the original footage, Yogi Adityanath is not speaking about himself. Instead, he is referring to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
In the original statement, Adityanath says:
“Let Modi ji become Prime Minister for the third time, and within the next six months, Pakistan-occupied Kashmir will also become a part of India.”
It is evident that the video has been trimmed and misleading text has been added to falsely portray the statement as a declaration about Yogi Adityanath becoming Prime Minister in 2029.
Claim
A YouTube user shared the viral video on January 29, 2026, claiming that Yogi Adityanath said, “Let me become Prime Minister, and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir will be part of India.” The video carries the caption “Next PM 2029,” suggesting that Adityanath is set to become the Prime Minister in 2029.
Link to the post n archive
Fact Check:
To verify the viral claim, we first conducted a keyword search on Google. During this process, we found a report published by Aaj Tak on May 18, 2024. According to the report, Yogi Adityanath stated that if Narendra Modi becomes Prime Minister for the third time, Pakistan-occupied Kashmir would become part of India within six months.
Report link:
Next, we extracted keyframes from the viral video and ran them through Google Lens. This led us to the official YouTube channel of Yogi Adityanath, where the same video was uploaded on May 18, 2024.
Original video link:
In the original video, Yogi Adityanath clearly makes the statement in reference to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, not himself.Finally, we compared the viral clip with the original footage. The visuals in both videos are identical; however, the viral version has been edited and overlaid with misleading text to change the meaning of the statement.
Conclusion
Our research confirms that the viral video is edited and misleading. The original video is from May 2024, in which Yogi Adityanath was speaking about Prime Minister Narendra Modi, not about himself becoming Prime Minister in 2029. The video has been falsely altered and shared with a deceptive claim on social media.
A photo showing Cilia Flores, wife of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, with visible injuries on her face is being widely shared on social media. Users claim the image was taken during her court appearance in the United States on January 5, alleging that she was beaten before being produced before a judge. Cyber Peace Foundation’s research found that the viral image was created using AI tools and is not real.
Claim:
A Facebook user shared the image claiming it shows Venezuelan President Maduro’s wife during her US court appearance, alleging physical assault prior to her arrest. The post also makes political and religious allegations in connection with the incident.Link, archive link and screenshot
Fact Check:
The viral image appeared suspicious due to unnatural facial details and injury patterns. Given the increasing use of artificial intelligence to generate fake visuals, Vishvas News analysed the image using AI image detection tools.TruthScan assessed the image as 93% likely to be AI-generated.
Sightengine flagged the image as 77% likely to be AI-generated.
The results indicate that the image is not authentic and has been created using AI tools.
What Official Reports Say
According to a CBS News report published on January 6, Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores were produced before a federal court in Lower Manhattan, where they pleaded not guilty to drug trafficking and other charges. They are currently lodged at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn The report states that the couple was detained during a US military operation. Following this, Venezuela’s Vice President Delcy Rodríguez was sworn in as the acting president. While Cilia Flores did appear before a Manhattan court, there is no authentic image showing her with injuries during the court proceedings. Link and Screenshot
https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/venezuela-trump-maduro-charges/
Conclusion:
The image being circulated as a photo of Cilia Flores during her US court appearance is AI-generated and fake. The claim that it shows injuries inflicted on her before being produced in court is false and misleading. The viral image has no connection with real court visuals.
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Digitisation in Agriculture
The traditional way of doing agriculture has undergone massive digitization in recent years, whereby several agricultural processes have been linked to the Internet. This globally prevalent transformation, driven by smart technology, encompasses the use of sensors, IoT devices, and data analytics to optimize and automate labour-intensive farming practices. Smart farmers in the country and abroad now leverage real-time data to monitor soil conditions, weather patterns, and crop health, enabling precise resource management and improved yields. The integration of smart technology in agriculture not only enhances productivity but also promotes sustainable practices by reducing waste and conserving resources. As a result, the agricultural sector is becoming more efficient, resilient, and capable of meeting the growing global demand for food.
Digitisation of Food Supply Chains
There has also been an increase in the digitisation of food supply chains across the globe since it enables both suppliers and consumers to keep track of the stage of food processing from farm to table and ensures the authenticity of the food product. The latest generation of agricultural robots is being tested to minimise human intervention. It is thought that AI-run processes can mitigate labour shortage, improve warehousing and storage and make transportation more efficient by running continuous evaluations and adjusting the conditions real-time while increasing yield. The company Muddy Machines is currently trialling an autonomous asparagus-harvesting robot called Sprout that not only addresses labour shortages but also selectively harvests green asparagus, which traditionally requires careful picking. However, Chris Chavasse, co-founder of Muddy Machines, highlights that hackers and malicious actors could potentially hack into the robot's servers and prevent it from operating by driving it into a ditch or a hedge, thereby impending core crop activities like seeding and harvesting. Hacking agricultural pieces of machinery also implies damaging a farmer’s produce and in turn profitability for the season.
Case Study: Muddy Machines and Cybersecurity Risks
A cyber attack on digitised agricultural processes has a cascading impact on online food supply chains. Risks are non-exhaustive and spill over to poor protection of cargo in transit, increased manufacturing of counterfeit products, manipulation of data, poor warehousing facilities and product-specific fraud, amongst others. Additional impacts on suppliers are also seen, whereby suppliers have supplied the food products but fail to receive their payments. These cyber-threats may include malware(primarily ransomware) that accounts for 38% of attacks, Internet of Things (IoT) attacks that comprise 29%, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, SQL Injections, phishing attacks etc.
Prominent Cyber Attacks and Their Impacts
Ransomware attacks are the most popular form of cyber threats to food supply chains and may include malicious contaminations, deliberate damage and destruction of tangible assets (like infrastructure) or intangible assets (like reputation and brand). In 2017, NotPetya malware disrupted the world’s largest logistics giant Maersk and destroyed all end-user devices in more than 60 countries. Interestingly, NotPetya was also linked to the malfunction of freezers connected to control systems. The attack led to these control systems being compromised, resulting in freezer failures and potential spoilage of food, highlighting the vulnerability of industrial control systems to cyber threats.
Further Case Studies
NotPetya also impacted Mondelez, the maker of Oreos but disrupting its email systems, file access and logistics for weeks. Mondelez’s insurance claim was also denied since NotPetya malware was described as a “war-like” action, falling outside the purview of the insurance coverage. In April 2021, over the Easter weekend, Bakker Logistiek, a logistics company based in the Netherlands that offers air-conditioned warehousing and food transportation for Dutch supermarkets, experienced a ransomware attack. This incident disrupted their supply chain for several days, resulting in empty shelves at Albert Heijn supermarkets, particularly for products such as packed and grated cheese. Despite the severity of the attack, the company successfully restored their operations within a week by utilizing backups. JBS, one of the world’s biggest meat processing companies, also had to pay $11 million in ransom via Bitcoin to resolve a cyber attack in the same year, whereby computer networks at JBS were hacked, temporarily shutting down their operations and endangering consumer data. The disruption threatened food supplies and risked higher food prices for consumers. Additional cascading impacts also include low food security and hindrances in processing payments at retail stores.
Credible Threat Agents and Their Targets
Any cyber-attack is usually carried out by credible threat agents that can be classified as either internal or external threat agents. Internal threat agents may include contractors, visitors to business sites, former/current employees, and individuals who work for suppliers. External threat agents may include activists, cyber-criminals, terror cells etc. These threat agents target large organisations owing to their larger ransom-paying capacity, but may also target small companies due to their vulnerability and low experience, especially when such companies are migrating from analogous methods to digitised processes.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation warns that the food and agricultural systems are most vulnerable to cyber-security threats during critical planting and harvesting seasons. It noted an increase in cyber-attacks against six agricultural co-operatives in 2021, with ancillary core functions such as food supply and distribution being impacted. Resultantly, cyber-attacks may lead to a mass shortage of food not only meant for human consumption but also for animals.
Policy Recommendations
To safeguard against digital food supply chains, Food defence emerges as one of the top countermeasures to prevent and mitigate the effects of intentional incidents and threats to the food chain. While earlier, food defence vulnerability assessments focused on product adulteration and food fraud, including vulnerability assessments of agriculture technology now be more relevant.
Food supply organisations must prioritise regular backups of data using air-gapped and password-protected offline copies, and ensure critical data copies are not modifiable or deletable from the main system. For this, blockchain-based food supply chain solutions may be deployed, which are not only resilient to hacking, but also allow suppliers and even consumers to track produce. Companies like Ripe.io, Walmart Global Tech, Nestle and Wholechain deploy blockchain for food supply management since it provides overall process transparency, improves trust issues in the transactions, enables traceable and tamper-resistant records and allows accessibility and visibility of data provenance. Extensive recovery plans with multiple copies of essential data and servers in secure, physically separated locations, such as hard drives, storage devices, cloud or distributed ledgers should be adopted in addition to deploying operations plans for critical functions in case of system outages. For core processes which are not labour-intensive, including manual operation methods may be used to reduce digital dependence. Network segmentation, updates or patches for operating systems, software, and firmware are additional steps which can be taken to secure smart agricultural technologies.
References
- Muddy Machines website, Accessed 26 July 2024. https://www.muddymachines.com/
- “Meat giant JBS pays $11m in ransom to resolve cyber-attack”, BBC, 10 June 2021. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-57423008
- Marshall, Claire & Prior, Malcolm, “Cyber security: Global food supply chain at risk from malicious hackers.”, BBC, 20 May 2022. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-61336659
- “Ransomware Attacks on Agricultural Cooperatives Potentially Timed to Critical Seasons.”, Private Industry Notification, Federal Bureau of Investigation, 20 April https://www.ic3.gov/Media/News/2022/220420-2.pdf.
- Manning, Louise & Kowalska, Aleksandra. (2023). “The threat of ransomware in the food supply chain: a challenge for food defence”, Trends in Organized Crime. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12117-023-09516-y
- “NotPetya: the cyberattack that shook the world”, Economic Times, 5 March 2022. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/newsletters/ettech-unwrapped/notpetya-the-cyberattack-that-shook-the-world/articleshow/89997076.cms?from=mdr
- Abrams, Lawrence, “Dutch supermarkets run out of cheese after ransomware attack.”, Bleeping Computer, 12 April 2021. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/dutch-supermarkets-run-out-of-cheese-after-ransomware-attack/
- Pandey, Shipra; Gunasekaran, Angappa; Kumar Singh, Rajesh & Kaushik, Anjali, “Cyber security risks in globalised supply chains: conceptual framework”, Journal of Global Operations and Strategic Sourcing, January 2020. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Shipra-Pandey/publication/338668641_Cyber_security_risks_in_globalized_supply_chains_conceptual_framework/links/5e2678ae92851c89c9b5ac66/Cyber-security-risks-in-globalized-supply-chains-conceptual-framework.pdf
- Daley, Sam, “Blockchain for Food: 10 examples to know”, Builin, 22 March 2023 https://builtin.com/blockchain/food-safety-supply-chain
