A Somali-born Oregon candidate spent days insisting that a viral video of her speaking in front of an upside-down American flag was an AI deepfake. The image offered as proof the flag had really been right side up has now tested positive for an AI watermark — and the newsroom that backed her story has retracted it.
Nafisa Fai is a Washington County commissioner from Aloha, Oregon, now running to chair the county board, which oversees a $2 billion annual budget. On October 10 she spoke at an event in Minneapolis for an organization representing African refugees and immigrants, recorded by Somali TV Minnesota. Behind the speakers hung an American flag — upside down. When the account End Wokeness posted a 26-second clip of Fai speaking Somali in front of the inverted flag, it exploded: reposted by Benny Johnson, Lara Logan, Rep. Nancy Mace and The Blaze, with commenters calling for her deportation. Fai said she had not checked the flag’s orientation before speaking and would never display it that way.
Then came the counterattack: the video, her side argued, was fake. On October 19, the Oregon Journalism Project published a story calling the footage manipulated, relying on an attendee’s account and a video provided by a Fai campaign supporter that appeared to show the flag right side up. Fai herself shared the story, writing that it was “a prime example of how AI can attempt to interfere with political campaigns and destroy people’s reputations and lives.” Oregon Democrats amplified it, calling the clip a “racist deepfake video” and evidence for regulating AI. Rep. Maxine Dexter called it a “racist, disgusting attack” and “yet another example of how misleading and malignant AI deepfakes can be.”
The story collapsed within a day. Open-source researchers dug up images from Somali TV Minnesota’s own Facebook page showing other speakers at the same event standing in front of the same upside-down flag. Attention turned to the supposedly exonerating right-side-up image — and testing reportedly found an OpenAI watermark in it, the signature of AI-generated or AI-modified material. A Community Note now attached to Fai’s own post states it flatly: “The original video containing the upside down flag is real, and was uploaded by Somali TV Minnesota. The image provided by Nafisa Fai is AI.”
On Tuesday, the Oregon Journalism Project unpublished its story and issued a retraction: after publication, it said, it “obtained new images that showed the flag at the Minneapolis event had in fact been upside down,” adding, “Oregon Journalism Project regrets the error.” The outlets that had republished the piece — Lookout Eugene-Springfield, The Banks Post and News in the Grove — pulled it and apologized too. Libs of TikTok summed up the reversal: the candidate is claiming the real clip is AI, and her evidence is an AI image. “You cannot make this up.”
Fai’s campaign has not explained the watermark. Her campaign manager first told reporters she would provide screenshots and a copy of the event video, then clarified that the material had already circulated online and did not come from someone known to have attended the event. Fai says her campaign did not supply the image used in the retracted report; the Journalism Project says it received it from a campaign supporter. The campaign still could not verify the image or locate the original event footage.
The episode lands in the final stretch of a race that was already bizarre: last month, board Chair Kathryn Harrington resigned six days after flipping her middle finger at Fai during a board meeting. Fai faces fellow Commissioner Pam Treece in the November 3 election. What voters now know is simpler than the spin: the flag really was upside down, the “deepfake” was not a deepfake — and the only AI in the story was on the side crying fake.
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