As election season approaches, White House officials are dismissing a series of videos circulating on social media suggesting President Biden’s mental health is declining as “cheap fakes.”
But conservative tech experts counter that the videos are genuinely problematic, and that the BidenShop backlash is part of an “election buzzwords” effort 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 fakery says more than we can say,” Bates added.
Videos of Biden taken at various events in recent weeks appear to show him appearing “confused.”
One video shows him stepping away from a group of world leaders to address parachutists at a ceremony marking the anniversary of the Normandy landings in France.
Another video shows him appearing unsure about when to sit down, and another from this week shows him being escorted off stage by former President Obama at a fundraiser.
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.
“It’s also very offensive to our viewers, so we feel we have to call it out. We call it ‘cheap fake,’ and that’s what the media and the fact checkers have called it. So we’re going to be really, really clear about that as well, and we’re going to call it out from our position, from our standpoint,” Jean-Pierre told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace on Tuesday.
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 further categorizes the “misinformation experts” under the umbrella of “pseudoscience,” an outgrowth of “digital politics.” This nascent field, where failed academics try to rebrand themselves, has found homes online, including as independent fact-checking websites and organizations, as well as media outlets, he said.
“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. That’s not really a very scientific or expert exercise.”
Denton further said the administration’s intention is to “gaslight” Americans into believing what they see on social media is a misrepresentation of Trump’s current situation.
But the reality is, he said, the videos accurately reflect his current cognitive abilities, and urged people to “reject these terms and buzzwords and evaluate the videos for what they are, because they are 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.
