Ahead of elections<\/span> in India’s third-most populous state of Bihar, a manipulated video of Bollywood actor Sonu Sood was shared in posts falsely claiming it showed him endorsing the candidacy of actor-turned-politician Khesari Lal Yadav. The video appears to have been altered from an unrelated clip posted on Sood\u2019s Instagram page, and its audio has been flagged as “very likely AI-generated” by a voice-cloning detection tool.<\/p>\n The video appearing to show Bollywood actor Sonu Sood endorsing actor-turned-politician Khesari Lal Yadav in the upcoming Bihar state assembly elections was shared on X<\/a> on October 29, 2025.<\/p>\n “Sonu Sood supports Khesari Lal Yadav, listen to what he said to his opponents,\u201d reads its Hindi-language caption.<\/p>\n The first half of the minute-long video appears to show Sood saying in Hindi:\u00a0“I heard that Khesari Lal Yadav is contesting the elections from Chhapra, and many people are opposing him.<\/p>\n “I want to tell those people: Who are you to question someone else’s decision? You chose your own path, and Khesari Lal chose his.\u00a0He\u2019s in the right place. I stand with Khesari, wish him all the best, and hope he wins the election to help the people.”<\/p>\n The second-half of the video is a Hindi-language voiceover<\/span> that says, “Friends, as you saw, Sonu Sood openly supported Khesari Lal Yadav and said, ‘Don’t worry, you will win.’ What are your thoughts on this? Let us know in the comments.”<\/p>\n Screenshot of the false X post, taken on October 31, 2025, with a red X mark added by AFP<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n The video was also shared in similar Instagram <\/a>and X posts<\/a> a week before the elections in Bihar<\/a> — India\u2019s third most populous state — scheduled for November 6, where a grand alliance of opposition parties including Congress, Rashtriya Janta Dal (RJD) and other left-wing parties is locked in a neck-and-neck contest with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-Janata Dal United alliance\u00a0(archived link<\/a>).<\/p>\n The polls will\u00a0see <\/span>Yadav<\/a> — a well-known Bhojpuri actor and singer — stand as a candidate for an opposition alliance hoping to wrest control of the state assembly from the ruling BJP bloc (archived link<\/a>).<\/p>\n But the video of Sood appearing to endorse Yadav shows signs of being manipulated.<\/p>\n The audio does not match the movement of Sood’s lips, and features abrupt edits.<\/p>\n AFP extracted the audio from the first half of the video and ran it through the Hiya.com voice-cloning detection tool within the Verification Plugin<\/a>, also known as InVID-WeVerify, which assessed it was “very likely AI-generated”.<\/p>\n