AI clip of soldiers marching on Indonesia's VP is fake

A TikTok video that appears to show Indonesian soldiers marching on parliament to demand the impeachment of the vice president is fake and AI-generated, according to AFP's fact-check unit.

AFP Fact Check published "AI-generated video of soldiers marching against Indonesia's VP misleads online" on October 20, 2026, written by Felix Nathaniel of AFP Indonesia with Johanes Hutabarat contributing. An Indonesian-language narrator in the clip, posted on October 12, 2026, says tens of thousands of retired Indonesian military personnel are marching toward the House of Representatives to demand that lawmakers immediately hold a session to impeach the vice president.

The clip, which AFP says is AI-generated, appears to show people in green camouflage uniforms resembling those worn by Indonesian military personnel, marching along a street carrying banners. Vice President Gibran Rakabuming was not in any such march, and no such rally was reported.

AFP's stated evidence is visual: overlapping and blurred text on the banners, unnatural walking movements, and many blurred faces. AFP ran the video through the SynthID detector, which found a SynthID watermark indicating the video was generated using Google's AI technology. AFP also says it could not find credible media reports of soldiers rallying in Jakarta as of October 19.

A reverse image search found the clip circulated in 2025 in posts making a similar claim, AFP says. Tirto, an Indonesian fact-checking outlet, debunked the same footage in September 2025, when an AI detector put its odds of being AI-generated at 99.9 percent.

The fake clip attaches itself to a real ruling. Indonesia's Constitutional Court rejected on October 6, 2026 a bid to disqualify Gibran over his high school credentials, Indonesia's state news agency Antara reported. The bid came from 12 petitioners, including former deputy law minister Denny Indrayana and six retired Indonesian soldiers. The court said it did not find convincing evidence Gibran had finished high school, but that the dispute could no longer be handled within the election dispute regime because he no longer held the status of vice-presidential candidate after being inaugurated.

Gibran's candidacy in the 2024 election drew controversy after the Constitutional Court, then headed by his uncle, amended the eligibility rules to allow candidates under 40 to contest. Retired Indonesian military personnel sent letters to parliament in 2025 calling for his impeachment and repeated the demand in 2026.

The clip joins several fake Indonesian demonstration videos AFP says it has debunked. The SynthID result is the part that matters for creators: Google's watermark can survive a re-upload to TikTok, and a detector can still read it months later.

Run a suspect clip through the SynthID detector before you share it; AFP's full fact-check is here.