A video shared on Facebook purports to feature a 911 call from a survivor of the recent Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore, Maryland.

Verdict: False

The purported 911 call featured in the Facebook video is not referenced in any credible news reports about the bridge collapse. Newsweek indicated the call is not authentic on Mar. 27. A media forensics and artificial intelligence (AI) expert told Check Your Fact that call is not authentic in an email.

Fact Check:

The bodies of two individuals were found amid recovery efforts following the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore, according to local news outlet WBAL TV 11. The bridge collapsed after being hit by an almost 1,000-foot cargo ship on Mar. 26, NBC News reported.

The Facebook video purports to feature a 911 call from a survivor of the recent Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore, Maryland. During the conversation with the dispatcher, the caller claims to be drowning under the bridge and in need of help. The caller also claims they were driving on the bridge when it collapsed.

The claim is false, however. Check Your Fact did not find the purported 911 call referenced in any credible news reports about the bridge collapse. In fact, the opposite is true. Newsweek indicated the call is not authentic on Mar. 27. According to the outlet, the 911 call appears to have been “artificially created” as evidenced by “changes in tone of voice, accent, and irregular speech patterns throughout [the call].”

Professor Manjeet Rege, an AI expert contacted by Newsweek, also said “unnatural speech patterns” are a clear indicator the call is fake.

“One sign is unnatural speech patterns—AI-generated speech may lack the natural variations, disfluencies, like ‘uh’ or ‘um’, and emotional nuances present in real human speech, sounding overly monotonous or robotic. Another potential giveaway is abnormalities in the background noise,” Rege, who serves as the director of the University of St. Thomas’ Center for Applied Artificial Intelligence, explained to the outlet. (RELATED: Putin Did Not Discuss ‘Black Jesus’ In TikTok Video, Its Audio Is AI-Generated)

Likewise, the purported 911 call is neither referenced on the U.S. Coast Guard’s website nor its verified social media accounts. The Maryland Sector of the Coast Guard also has not publicly commented on the claim. The Baltimore Police Department has not issued a statement about the purported 911 call, either.

Dr. Walter Scheirer, a media forensics and AI expert from the University of Notre Dame, told Check Your Fact that the call is not authentic in an email.

“The audio track accompanying this post is of very poor quality, and is likely AI generated. The voice of the dispatcher switches back and forth from a synthetic robo-voice to something more natural sounding. The callers sound different in places on a sentence-by-sentence basis. Such an effect can occur when different, similar sounding, training voices are deployed by an underlying AI model to create one sequence of synthetic speech,” Scheirer said.

Check Your Fact has also contacted the U.S. Coast Guard for comment and will update this piece accordingly if one is received.