More Americans may be thinking of being president Joe Biden I recently tried to sit on a non-existent chair and then knew the boring truth that there was, in fact, a chair.
The chair sitting there was just one of many rapid-fire video clips that the conservative media ecosystem has spun into existence over the past two weeks, giving fact-checkers and Biden’s team little chance to catch up.
The Republican National Committee, major conservative media outlets and right-wing influencers have managed to air videos that they claim are “evidence” of Biden wandering off, freezing or even filling his pants with a substance commonly represented by a brown swirl emoji .
Independent fact-checkers and the Biden campaign have pointed out that the videos, while not edited by artificial intelligence, tend to crumble under even basic scrutiny, such as when the moments are viewed in context or from wider camera angles.
“After being fact-checked by at least six mainstream outlets for lying about President Biden with cheap fakes, Rupert Murdoch’s sad little super PAC, the New York Post, is back to disrespecting his readers and himself,” Witte said House Speaker Andrew Bates. said in a statement in response to a video of Biden at a fundraiser with former President Barack Obama last weekend, which landed on the cover of the Post, a conservative tabloid.
While “deepfakes” are deceptive audio, video, or images created or edited with artificial intelligence technology, according to researchers Britt Paris and Joan Donovan, a “cheap fake” is a “manipulation created with cheaper, more accessible software (or, none at all) . Cheap fakes can be rendered through Photoshop, lookalikes, recontextualizing footage, speeding or slowing down.”
But even though they are deceptive, the videos nonetheless play on voters’ existing concerns about Biden’s age and are tailor-made for internet virality, meaning busy voters are more likely to encounter the short inflammatory clips than the stricter fact-checking that haunts them.
“The lie is sprinting the 100 meters and the fact check is a walk on the beach. So it will never catch up. And it will never have the same reach,” Eric Schultz, a Democratic strategist and Obama spokesman, said Sunday publicly declared the Post’s characterization of the fundraiser as false.
Last week, Republicans posted a video of Biden in Europe attending the Group of Seven summit, in which he reportedly “wandered off” in a confused haze before the Italian prime minister pulled him out. Uncut video footage and shots from wider angles showed Biden greeting a paratrooper who had just landed as part of the ceremony.
The controversy sparked by the video became so great that British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was asked to give his eyewitness account of the moment.
‘They had all landed and he was very polite. And he just went over and spoke to each of them individually,” Sunak told reporters.
Before that, the RNC’s opposition investigative report suggested that Biden had a medical incident for not dancing at a Juneteenth event, even though Biden has long said he is not much of a dancer and barely danced at his 2021 inaugural ball.
At the fundraiser in Los Angeles, Biden and Obama were waving to supporters after receiving a standing ovation, when Biden briefly stared into the audience before the more punctual Obama signaled it was time to leave the stage. Several people at the event said yes didn’t recognize it the New York Post’s interpretation that Biden “appears to be freezing.”
‘A pattern of behavior’
Republicans are unapologetic about the individual videos — despite fact-checking from the mainstream media they distrust.
“It’s a pattern of behavior. It is not the case that it concerns one copy.” Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in an interview. “It’s not like we’re making these videos. This is Joe Biden in real time. We’re just putting it out there for the world to see.”
Asked about the clipped video that Republicans said showed Biden trying to sit in a chair that didn’t exist (in fact, it was just obscured by the camera angle), Leavitt said, “The videos speak for themselves.”
“It is scandalous that the words ‘cheap fake’ [are] they are even used,” she said. “There is nothing cheap or fake about these videos. They are real clips of Joe Biden behaving bizarrely.
“The entire strategy of the Biden campaign is to convince people not to believe their own eyes,” she added.
The spread of the videos underlines what academics say could be a particularly tumultuous election cycle. Many major social media platforms, under pressure from Republicans, have rolled back the few checks and balances on the spread of false or misleading information. Meanwhile, the power and reach of just a handful of accounts on X can spread talking points to millions of people, which are then picked up by more mainstream conservative media.
Taking liberties with video editing – or simply misrepresenting what’s happening in a video – is nothing new. But former President Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party has pushed the party further across the blurred divide between distortion and mendacity, while technology has allowed clips to be cut and broadcast on an ongoing basis.
Reaching voters who don’t consume much political news is a challenge at best, and it’s made even more difficult when organizations try to reach the same voters a second time in an attempt to change their minds about a stray piece of political content that encountered them before.
Conservative media outlets spreading such segments include not only famous ideological segments like Fox News, but also Sinclair Broadcasting’s vast network of local TV news stations, dozens of which have run identical versions of the same headline about Biden appearing to freeze again wrapped up.
Few in the conservative media have offered any resistance to the onslaught of videos. Fox News host and media journalist Howard Kurtz is one of the few notable outliers, having called out the New York Post and fellow host Sean Hannity for their reporting on the G7 video.
And the algorithms of internet platforms and the organic behavior of their users tend to reward the surprising and controversial, while ignoring the mundane.
“We can’t stop them from doing this.”
Democrats’ strategy for dealing with the videos is two-fold, according to multiple people familiar with the thinking of the Biden campaign, the White House and allied outside groups.
First, they will try to keep them within the conservative media ecosystem and extreme online spaces of political discourse like X, hoping to prevent them from breaking into the mainstream as much as possible.
By means of be aggressive By fact-checking, quickly posting fuller video clips with proper context and calling out media outlets reporting on them, the White House and Biden campaign hope to prevent them from spreading too far.
“We can’t stop them from doing this. What we can do is fight like hell to get fact checks and spread those fact checks,” said a Biden campaign official who requested anonymity to speak candidly about strategy. “Is the potential getting through to independent voters? Yes, and that is what we guard against and what we fight against.”
Second, Democrats are ramping up their own attacks on Trump online, aggressively posting their own custom-made viral videos of Trump’s verbal dead ends, curious tangents, and awkward actions.
They include highlighting what they say are Trump’s biggest moments, including one at a rally Saturday night when he said Biden “should take a cognitive test” — only to mention, moments later, the name of the doctor who gave him a similar test. test had been administered. .
Much of it comes from Biden headquarters, an account the Biden campaign’s investigative and rapid response teams are using to destroy Trump. For example, indoors one fragment from the same eventTrump promised to answer questions after his speech: “This is different from Joe Biden. He doesn’t answer questions” – but instead left the stage without asking any questions.
Schultz said: “Both candidates are old, but one is coherent and has compelling thoughts. So as far as that breaks through, I think it will be fine in November.”
Trump’s campaign has also complained about the Biden campaign’s deceptive portrayals of its own videos in the past. That included Trump telling autoworkers that there would be a “bloodbath” if he is not elected. Trump’s campaign said the term referred specifically to the auto industry and that Democrats deliberately mischaracterized it to give the impression that Trump was inciting violence.
Yet Democrats, up to and including Biden himself – – hardly a digital native – seem to understand the challenge of suppressing viral videos, something many Americans would like to believe.
“The truth is, the way we communicate with people today, there’s very little — there’s so much opportunity to just lie,” Biden said at the fundraiser in Los Angeles. “So much of it on the internet is absolutely an outright lie.”
First lady Jill Biden tackled the issue of Biden’s age head-on Saturday at a senior event in Phoenix: “Joe and the other guy are essentially the same age, so let’s not be fooled.”
So far, according to polls, voters don’t agree with her. And some Democrats seem to be constantly bracing for a key, unedited moment where Biden shows his age.
NBC News’ national poll in late January found that three-quarters of voters, including many Democrats, said they had major or minor concerns about Biden’s physical and mental health.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
