Does Melania Trump have a body double from the perspective of automatic face verification?

With the growing number of users getting updated about current events through social media, the spread of misinformation is increasing and thus endorsing conspiracy belief. During the last presidential election campaign in the USA, the conspiracy theory claiming the existence of a body double that stands in for the former first lady Melania Trump had made international news headlines. Fighting the spread of misinformation is crucial as it is threatening the society by manipulating the public opinion. In this paper, we explore whether automatic face verification can help in verifying widespread misinformation on social media, dealing particularly with the conspiracy theory related to Melania Trump replacement. We employed four different state-of-the-art descriptors for face recognition to verify the integrity of the claim of the studied conspiracy theory. In addition, we assessed the impact of different image quality metrics on the variation of the face verification scores. Two sets of image quality metrics were considered: acquisition-related metrics and subject-related metrics.