-This is Gabon.
A country located on the Western Coast of Central Africa.
It's rich in oil
and has been relatively stable in recent decades,
especially compared to its neighbors.
But on the morning of January 7, 2019,
gunshots can be heard outside the national radio station.
Inside, armed soldiers have taken control.
-Gabonese, Gabonese.
Dear compatriots, I am Lieutenant Kelly
Ondo Obiang, deputy commander
of the Republican Guard's honor campaign.
-What you're witnessing is an attempted coup,
spurred, in part, by rumors about the president's health.
President Ali Bongo hadn't been seen in public for months.
The government provided little information about his health.
Rumors and speculation
about whether he was alive or dead spread.
-Over the health of the Gabonese president.
-And, in the president's first address to the nation
since the rumors began,
critics noted changes in his facial comportment.
A week later, soldiers stormed the national radio station.
This story is about how misinformation
helped spark an attempted coup in Gabon.
And how, in a world where new technologies
can fabricate videos, the truth becomes elusive.
Ali Bongo Ondimba has been the president of Gabon
for two terms.
And his father before him had been president
for over 40 years.
In October 2018, Bongo was in Riyadh,
Saudi Arabia, attending the Future Investment
Initiative summit.
Shortly after the start of the program,
on October 25, 2018,
the Saudi press agency transmitted a report:
"President Ali Bongo is in the hospital".
Over the next few months,
the Gabonese government released inconsistent health reports.
It only helped feed rumors.
Bongo's rule was already contentious.
When he won his second term in 2016,
violence erupted in the capital city.
Protestors alleged that his win was fraudulent,
but Bongo has denied any wrongdoing.
-To those who don't accept the constitutional court ruling
and who are protesting, like the opposition leader,
Jean Ping, what do you have to say to them?
-Well, I have to say that,
first, the system, our system is good; it's fair.
-So, when Ali Bongo disappeared,
his detractors aired their theories on the Internet.
A journalist in Gabon spoke to The Post anonymously,
citing fear of government retaliation.
We altered his voice to conceal his identity.
-The opposition, taking advantage of this incident,
they put a lot of communication in social networks
that gave the impression that it's possible
the president was dead.
We did not know if that is what was happening.
But some guards secretly told us
that the president was still alive
because, if he died, he would have been buried.
But, otherwise, there was not a lot of official information,
which was scary.
-In early December,
the government released a video of the president,
but there was no sound.
On December 9th, the vice president was the first
in the administration to say Ali Bongo had a stroke.
-He said the president was in bad shape,
that he wouldn't wish on his worst enemy.
-Weeks later, a video of Ali Bongo's annual
New Year's address was published.
-Hello, compatriots.
The Gabonese people, before anything else,
allow me to address to you all before I leave.
-It was his first public statement since falling ill,
and he looked [pause] different.
A neurologist told The Post his appearance appeared
consistent with someone who had a stroke or a brain injury,
and even cosmetic procedures.
-He has a great deal of facial makeup
and I think he probably had Botox
because neither side of his face is moving.
You don't see the wrinkles in his forehead
and in most of the rest of the face.
You look at his eye,
the distance between the upper lid
and the lower lid is greater on the right than on the left,
and that's an indication of facial weakness.
And, finally, that right hand is quite puffy
and quite consistent with nonuse,
due to weakness or paralysis.
-But many Gabonese, especially critics of the president,
were not convinced that the president's strange appearance
was health-related.
-Many thought that Ali Bongo was dead; many were even convinced;
many Gabonese were convinced the person
we saw in the presidency,
who was presenting as Ali Bingo, many thought it was a lookalike.
-Some thought it was a deep fake,
or a video manipulated with artificial intelligence.
They tweeted their theories and a Gabonese publication
reported the deep fake suspicions.
Steve Grobman, the chief technology officer
at the cyberdefense firm McAfee,
ran the video through two forensic tests,
and both came back with nearly a 92% probability
of being authentic.
Professor of Computer Science Siwei Lyu
focuses on digital media forensics.
He ran the video through his deep fake algorithm.
The higher the score values, the max is one,
the more likely the video is authentic.
This deep fake scored 0point0.
The New Year's address scored 0point99.
Lyu said that means the algorithm didn't find signal
cues in the video
that appear in existing deep fake generation methods,
and so, this evidence suggests it was probably just
an overly staged video of a sick president.
But the controversy over his health,
the months of misinformation,
and the already fragile political and economical
situation was a recipe for unrest.
-Around 3:00 and 4:00 in the morning,
we heard the gunshots at the national radio station.
Because I do not live far from the radio station
and that's where we heard the shots,
thought it was firecrackers thrown by young people,
but, finally, we realized that it was the coup
because the attackers were broadcast live on the radio.
-There were many theories as to why the president
appeared changed in the New Year's address.
The soldiers claimed that Ali Bongo was being propped up
by those around him.
They didn't trust that he was in control.
-The soldiers thought that the person who read
the speech was manipulated and was not Ali Bongo anymore.
He no longer had all of his physical abilities
and he was manipulated by those around him.
-Once again, those fiercely holding onto power
continue to use and to back President Ali Bongo Ondimba
to keep in place an invalid
who has lost his physical and mental faculties.
The dreadful spectacle of this New Year's speech
is bringing shame in the eyes of the world
to our country that has lost its dignity.
-The attempted coup ended in a day and Ali Bongo
has since made public appearances,
but he's undergone an undeniable physical change
and the opposition continues to question his ability to govern.
The New Year's video was a trigger
for those who distrusted Bongo or his administration
and the chain of events that followed
is an example of how easy it is,
in this age of suspect information,
for governments to lose credibility.