The mystery behind an audio clip that helped upend a Senate race
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Late last month, left-wing firebrand Hasan Piker showed his Twitch viewers a social media post quoting a supposed audio recording of a Jewish American politician saying that the primary objective of his campaign was to aid Israel.
That ambiguity has helped the episode fester and highlights how artificial intelligence tools can destabilize the information ecosystem voters rely on to make their decisions. Those tools have made it easier to imitate a person’s voice or likeness, while their very existence has also made it easier to dismiss potentially authentic material as fake.
Murky origins
The purported Moss audio took a particularly circuitous path.
The comments surfaced last November, when a user on a Reddit forum called TrackAIPAC posted a 25-second audio clip of a person identified as Moss saying that the entire purpose of his campaign was to ensure continued U.S. support for Israel. The speaker also says it’s not wrong for American Jews to want to put Israel first, because American Jews have been victims of antisemitism and the United States “is not our homeland.”
The recording wasn’t widely spread, however, until July, when Moss’s then-Democratic primary opponent in the race for Michigan’s 11th Congressional District posted it to her X account.
Weeks later, Moss addressed the recording publicly, calling it “manipulated and unsourced” political disinformation that “peddles in offensive tropes and lies” and contains “things I never did and never would say.” He wrote that circulating the clip was eroding democracy.
His statement did not address whether he believed the entire recording to be false or just parts of it.
The origins of the recording are murky. The group whose name matches the subreddit where they were initially posted, TrackAIPAC, said the subreddit where the comments were posted is an impostor and not affiliated with its group, which tracks and opposes the pro-Israel lobby.
Moss’s Democratic opponent, Aisha Farooqi, who posted the recording months later, said she could not share anything about the audio’s origins or who recorded it.
Another political group opposed to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the American Independence Project, made its own post about the clip, appending misleading captions to the video claiming the speaker says Israel uses the U.S. as a “pawn,” which cannot be heard in the clip. That post racked up at least 1.5 million views on X. (TrackAIPAC’s official X account amplified the clip, as well, in July.)
When the comments reached Piker’s show, on Aug. 20, he was being asked by a viewer how best to persuade fellow Jewish people at synagogue to oppose Zionism. Piker had displayed a social media post containing Moss’s alleged comments and started talking about the dangers American Jews face if the public believes Judaism is synonymous with support for Israel and its government’s actions.
“If Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they’re singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone is going to come around and take action — not against Israel, mind you, but against American Jews,” Piker said.
Those comments drew rebukes from top Democrats as well as Republicans and sparked Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan who had campaigned with Piker, to distance himself from the streamer, saying Piker did not speak for him. Some of El-Sayed’s critics said he should have issued a stronger condemnation.
No evidence of AI alteration
Experts in detecting digital fakes who reviewed the audio clip told The Post they were not able to find evidence that the clip was altered by AI.
Hany Farid, a leading expert in digital forensics and chief science officer at GetReal Security, which detects deepfakes, analyzed the clip using the company’s model that is trained to distinguish real from AI-generated voices and found no evidence of AI generation. The audio does not sound as if it were spliced together, either, Farid added, and the clip’s metadata suggests it is an iPhone recording.
Henk van Ess, an investigator with expertise in detecting AI-generated content, said a commercial audio detection tool, Hive, did not flag that the clip as AI generated. A leading voice technology firm, ElevenLabs, said the clip was not made with their tool, he added.
The origins of the clip are unknown, however, and neither expert could authenticate the recording. AI detection tools are not 100 percent foolproof, and neither analyst performed a biometric match to confirm Moss’s voice.
A spokesperson for Moss declined an interview request. She did not answer whether Moss denies making specific statements in the clip, including that the entire purpose of his campaign was to ensure U.S. support for Israel.
‘Liar’s dividend’
The episode illustrates how AI-generated videos and other content in politics have made it harder for voters to know what to believe — a distrust that political actors can take advantage of in multiple ways.
At least one candidate for Congress, Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wisconsin), has promoted an AI-generated video of his Democratic opponent calling voters “peasants” and herself “the anointed one,” which Democrats slammed as an attempt to trick voters.
The existence of AI can also benefit candidates who want to cast doubt on the authenticity of a damaging story, said Greg Bowen, a Democratic political consultant in Michigan.
“It might have been an AI video,” he said.
President Donald Trump has also invoked AI to cast doubt on events, including when he told Fox News that images showing evidence of a U.S. strike on an Iranian school could have been faked.
Researchers have called this phenomenon a “liar’s dividend,” where politicians can distance themselves from a negative story with little downside.
“This case is going to be repeated in every single congressional district in different ways, and it’s just making people say: ‘No, I can’t. I can’t be part of a process where I don’t have the certainty that I need to have,’” Wardle said.
Moss’s opponent in the congressional race, Troy Mayor Ethan Baker (R), said in a statement that the level of hatred directed at Moss about the recording is “unhealthy” and damaging and urged people to de-escalate their rhetoric. But he also said Moss should explain the comments that have concerned “many people of the 11th Congressional District,” saying his denials may have been referencing the inaccurate captions appended by one group to the recording online.
The recording’s other comments “have yet to be clearly refuted or explained,” Baker said.
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The curse of Pandora’s box is Hope being the last to exit, the curse of the AI box is Pandora being the first to enter. (or some such nonsense)
I'm surprised more elected maga scum or candidates haven't used the AI excuse when they're caught saying stupid shit on camera ...
Those who will not have achieved a Masters in Denial by this November will surely have by November 2028.
Neither is Israel. If I was 100% Catholic my homelands would be the USA and Ireland, not Italy, Rome or the Vatican.
Where do you believe Jews came from?
Various diasporas.
I see. You believe it's the first ethnicity and religion that spontaneously arose at various places around the world with no common origin point. I guess that's a fiction progressive dogma require to even attempt to be coherent. .
Abraham, 4,000 years ago, a resident of Ur, Iraq (now, then it was Mesopotamia) who "god" told to travel to Caanan in the Levant.
For roughly 700 years they were nomads collected up by the Egyptians for slaves for a hundred years, escaped back to Caanan where the whole region was conquered over and over until the Roman Jewish wars when Rome destroyed the Jews in battle and scattered them across the old world. The Romans renamed Judea to Syria Palestinia.
1800 years later the Brits and the UN, both antisemitics, decided that the jews could have Jerusalem and the shithole called Palestine that they could not control. Apparently as long as most of the Jews were not in Britain or Europe that was their solution.
Modern Israel isn't even 100 years old yet. Hardly a homeland.
Apparently not.
Stop gaslighting. There is no Jewish gene. Test a thousand Jews and you will get Various Diasporas. It's a religion, not an ethnicity.
And there you go again with the personal attacks.
I didn't say there was a "jewish gene." Pay attention..
Test a thousand Jews and you will get Various Diasporas.
Do you know what diaspora means? The various diasporas originally emigrated from the area around the current country of Israel. This is not debatable.
There are Irish diasporas in England, America, Canada Australia etc.. It'd be like claiming the Australian Irish sprang up independently of the Irish in Ireland and they have no relationship.
It's a religion, not an ethnicity.
it's ethnicity and a religion. One can be ethnically Jewish and not a member of the religion, and one can be a member of the Jewish religion without being ethnically Jewish.
re you go again with the personal attacks.
Only if you consider yourself to be the personal embodiment of all things progressive.
of course there is, I'm wearing a pair of levi's now ...
oh wait, nevermind ...
/s