Fact-Check: Is Leaked Phone Conversation Between Peter Obi And Bishop Oyedepo Describing 2023 Election As Religious War Real?

Fact-Check: Is Leaked Phone Conversation Between Peter Obi and Bishop Oyedepo Describing 2023 Election as Religious War Real?

Claim: In a leaked private phone conversation published by Peoples Gazette, an alleged voice of Peter Obi, the Presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP) in the 2023 general election could be heard begging Bishop David Oyedepo, the founder of the Living Faith Church Worldwide, to help canvass Christian votes on the eve of Nigeria’s presidential election, describing it as a “religious war.”

Full Text: The release of the leaked phone conversation has generated heated controversy online, especially on the Twitter handle of the Gazzette with over 6.9m views, 2,768 retweets, 6,211 likes, 4,103 quotes and 1812 bookmarks at the time of this fact-check on Sunday morning April 2, 2023 at 12pm.

While Artificial Intelligence (AI) software can be used to mimic any voice after a few seconds of listening to it, Peter Obi’s Voice returned 93% accuracy after listening to it while Oyedepo’s voice returned with 84% accuracy level when PRNigeria subjected the audio to the speech recognition test.

Further investigations by PRNigeria show that this can be done using Microsoft’s Vall-E, a text-to-speech AI Model that can recreate and match any sample audio it’s been provided with. It can also change the tonality from happy to sad to angry.

While it may be unfathomable for calls to initiate recording on dial, it is possible for the same calls to be intercepted by hackers or intelligence sources.

PRNigeria, therefore, subjected the audio to a deepfake test using Deepware scanner, an AI tool used to detect alterations in audio and videos and found that AI was not used in generating or modifying the voices.

To cross-examine its findings, PRNigeria sent the audio to three voice recognition experts (working in an intelligence service, forensic agency and a private consultant) for authentication and they separately confirmed that the voices were factual.

PRNigeria went on further to verify some of the claims made during the conversation. For example, Mr Oyedepo told Obi at exactly 1:16mins into the conversation that he did a review titled “Nigeria Going Forward” and he was coming out with the second one “today…when they wouldn’t have time to do damage control.” A quick online check confirmed this.

Similarly, when Bishop Oyedepo asked Mr Peter Obi if he was in Lagos or Abuja, Mr Obi responded, “I am in Onitsha now.”

With the dictionary definition of “eve” meaning, “the day or period of time immediately before an event or occasion, PRNigeria confirmed that Obi was indeed in Onitsha on the eve of the elections when the conversation took place and he had tweeted this himself on the 23rd February stating, “I’ve just arrived in Onitsha for several engagements, including my meeting with the United Nations Team visiting Nigeria.- PO.”

Conclusion: Conclusive results from PRNigeria’s digital and forensic investigation of the leaked phone conversation did not show any evidence of using deepfake AI technology to manipulate Nigeria’s news circle into believing that Mr Obi declared the election a religious war and begged Mr Oyedepo to help him canvass for votes.

PRNigeria, therefore, concludes that the leaked phone conversation is to a very large extent FACTUAL.

– PRNIGERIA