As election season approaches, White House officials have dismissed a series of videos circulating on social media that purportedly show President Biden’s declining mental health as “cheap fakes.” But conservative tech experts counter that the videos are genuinely troubling, and that the BidenShop backlash is part of an “election buzzword” campaign aimed at pressuring social media platforms to take “action.”
“Discredited right-wing critics of President Biden, who have promoted the 2020 election was stolen and other debunked lies, clearly feel threatened by a wide range of bipartisan fact-checkers who have peeled back the curtain of cheap, false smears they have been forced to rely on, because the last thing they want to discuss are Joe Biden’s policies to cut taxes for working families and keep violent crime at an all-time low,” White House press secretary Andrew Bates told Fox News Digital.
“Their panicked reaction to mainstream reporters from The Washington Post, NBC News, PolitiFact and others quoting disinformation experts exposing cheap anti-Biden fake news tells us more than we can tell,” Bates added.
Social media mocks Biden for being led behind the scenes by the First Lady
The Republican National Committee’s research arm posted several videos on Thursday that appear to show President Biden in a “constant state of confusion.”
Videos of Biden at various events in recent weeks show him appearing “confused.” In one, he looks away from a group of world leaders to address parachutists at an event marking the anniversary of the Normandy landings in France. In another, he appears unsure when to sit down, and in another video released this week, he appears confused. Removed from the stage Former President Obama held a fundraising event.
On Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre stressed that the videos were “cheap fakes,” which the Media Manipulation Casebook defines as “altered media” that does not require sophisticated techniques such as Photoshop (including face swapping), look-alikes, or video speed adjustments.
The term was used in several news articles. Early 2019But the numbers have increased significantly this week, sparked by a video of Biden on social media.
“If it looks awful, that’s because it is awful.”
“It’s also very offensive to our viewers, so we think we have to condemn it. We call it a ‘cheap fake,’ that’s what the media and the fact checkers have called it. So we’re going to be very clear on that as well, and from our position, we’re going to condemn it from our standpoint,” Jean-Pierre told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace on Tuesday.
Karine Jean-Pierre criticizes Biden’s ‘cheap fake’ video: ‘Too much misinformation’
President Biden walked across the South Lawn and boarded Marine One on December 8, 2023, before departing the White House. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
But not everyone believes this explanation: It’s all part of “campaign slogans and buzzwords,” according to Jake Denton, a technology researcher at the Heritage Foundation.
“It’s pretty clear what’s going on here,” Denton told Fox News Digital. “They’re trying to shoehorn a new term under the umbrella of misinformation and pressure social media companies to take action against these types of videos.”
The term “cheap imitation” also comes just a week before Biden is scheduled to debate former President Trump, the Republican front-runner in the general election.
“This requires you to go through the stages of claiming that something is ‘cheap fake’ or that there is some malice involved in the misinformation, and then you need evidence, fact patterns, etc. to make takedown requests to social media companies because it’s election misinformation. To me, that’s kind of the seed that’s being sown here.”
Denton went on to categorize the “misinformation experts” under the umbrella of “pseudoscience,” an outgrowth of “digital politics.” This nascent online space is where failed academics try to rebrand themselves, and they’ve found a home among independent fact-checking websites and organizations, as well as in the media, he said.
Normandy exposes Biden’s ‘perpetual state of confusion’ as recognition questions grow
President Biden and former President Trump (Win McNamee/Getty Images | Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
“At the end of the day, there’s not much science in it,” Denton says. “They’re experts, but what are they actually analysing? It’s true that creating deepfakes requires expertise, but when it comes to cheap fakes, or misinformation more broadly, it’s just sifting through the rubbish on social media to determine what’s true and what’s not. It’s not a very scientific or technical undertaking.”
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Denton went on to say that the administration’s intent is to “gaslight” the public into believing that what they’re seeing on social media misrepresents the president’s current state, but in reality, he said, the video accurately reflects the president’s current cognitive abilities, and urged people to “reject these terms and buzzwords and evaluate the video for what it is, because it is very incriminating.”
“If it looks bad, that’s because it is bad,” he said.
The president’s mental capacity has been at the center of political debate this month after a bombshell report in the Washington Journal, denied by the White House, revealed that Biden’s aging was evident in private meetings, with many saying it was obvious, and that many members of Congress had doubts about his mental capacity.
