How to spot a deepfake video
7 min read · Updated 4 August 2026
Synthetic video has crossed the point where a first glance settles anything. These checks go in order of speed: the first three take seconds, the last three are what actually decide it.
In a hurry? Paste the message, link or image into VeriFix Verify and get an evidence-backed verdict in seconds.
1.Watch the mouth at quarter speed
Play the clip at 0.25x and watch only the lips. Face-swap and lip-sync models drift on plosives (p, b, m) and on fast consonant clusters, and they rarely close the mouth fully. If the audio has a hard consonant but the lips stay parted, you are looking at synthesis or a dub.
2.Look at the boundary of the face
Follow the jawline, hairline and ears as the head turns. Swapped faces show a faint seam, a shimmer, or a patch of skin tone that shifts when the subject moves quickly. Glasses frames and stray hair strands crossing the boundary are where the mask breaks.
3.Count blinks and check the eyes
People blink roughly every four to six seconds in conversation. Synthetic faces often blink too rarely, too regularly, or with both eyelids moving in perfect lockstep. Also check reflections: two eyes lit by the same room should carry the same highlight in the same place.
4.Listen for the room, not the voice
Cloned voices are convincing, but the space around them usually is not. Real audio carries room tone — a faint constant hiss, echo matching the visible room, breath before long sentences, mic handling noise. A voice that sounds recorded in a booth while the speaker stands on a street is the tell.
5.Question the framing before the pixels
Most political 'deepfakes' that go viral in India are cheapfakes: a real clip slowed down, sped up, clipped mid-sentence, or given a false subtitle. Find the full-length version before judging the excerpt. A 12-second clip that starts mid-answer is a red flag on its own.
6.Trace the earliest upload
Take a screenshot of a distinctive frame and reverse image search it, and search the quoted words with the speaker's name. Sort by date. If the earliest copy is an anonymous account posted yesterday and no broadcaster or official handle carries it, the burden of proof has not been met.
7.Check whether the person or body has responded
For any consequential clip — a politician, a police order, a company announcement — the named party almost always responds within a day. Check their verified account, the party or ministry handle, and mainstream coverage in both English and the local language.
Frequently asked
- Can I detect a deepfake just by looking?
- Increasingly not, especially on a small phone screen with heavy compression. Visual tells still work on lower-effort fakes, but the reliable method is provenance: find the original upload and check whether a source that would have to know has confirmed it.
- What is a cheapfake and why does it matter more?
- A cheapfake is real footage manipulated without AI — trimmed, reordered, slowed, or given a false caption or subtitle. They are far more common than true deepfakes and they spread faster because nothing in the pixels is wrong.
- Does VeriFix check videos?
- Yes. You can submit a video link or upload a clip in Verify, and VeriFix will trace related coverage and return a verdict with the sources behind it.
- Someone forwarded me a clip — what should I do first?
- Don't forward it on. Run the mouth and audio checks, search the earliest upload, then paste the link into VeriFix. If it turns out false, use the nudge feature to send the sender a polite correction with the evidence.
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