Video showing actor Rashmika Mandanna in a red bikini is a deepfake

What’s the claim

A video on social media that appears to show Indian actor Rashmika Mandanna in a red bikini posing at a waterfall behind her is being shared on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. At the time of writing this story, one post had garnered over 45,000 likes and nearly 300 shares. An archived version can be seen here.

However, the video is a deepfake. We could trace the original clip back to the Instagram account of one Daniela Villarreal (archived here), who describes herself as a model and a content creator based in Colombia’s Santander. 

The discrepancies

Upon a closer look, we observed discrepancies in the viral clip featuring Mandanna. Towards the end of the video, the woman's eye movements appear unnatural, particularly her right eye's as she looks down, suggesting the video is manipulated.

Screenshot showing the discrepancy. (Source: Facebook/Screenshot)

The original video

On conducting a reverse image search, we found an Instagram post by the page onlybikinimodel (archived here) featuring a different woman in the same setting. This post mentioned the name of the person in the video as @danielavillarreal_a. 

We clicked through Villarreal's Instagram account and found that the video  (archived here) was uploaded on her profile on April 19, 2024. We could also see some other pictures in the same bikini that were uploaded on her profile in April. Archived version can be seen here.

The video was also analyzed using the Itisaar tool, a deepfake detection tool developed by IIT Jodhpur and verified by Mayank Vatsa, which categorized it as a deepfake with a very high confidence rating. Vatsa is a professor at the Department of Computer Science & Engineering, IIT Jodhpur, and a member of Shakti Collective’s Synthetic Media and Deepfakes Advisory Council. The result also highlighted that the face was altered using the swapping approach.

In November 2023, another deepfake video of Mandanna in a black bodysuit was widely circulated. This had prompted the Indian government to issue a directive to the social media intermediaries asking them to remove such videos from the platforms within 24 hours of a complaint being filed.

Logically Facts has previously debunked several other such videos and you can read them here. You can also read our detailed article on detecting deepfake images and videos generated using artificial intelligence here.

The verdict

Based on the above evidence, it is evident that the viral video of Rashmika Mandanna in a red bikini is a deepfake. 

(Note: We have reached out to Daniela Villarreal and the story will be updated if and when we receive a response.)