TOPLINE
In less than 24 hours, Twitter flagged three tweets from Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), White House social media director Dan Scavino, and the Trump campaign for spreading “manipulated media” in messages attacking Joe Biden, a sign that misinformation — pushed mostly by GOP lawmakers and the Trump campaign — is flooding the 2020 race in an election year that’s playing out primarily online.
WASHINGTON, DC - AUGUST 31: U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to the media during a news conference ... [+]
KEY FACTS
Scalise shared a doctored clip of an interview between Biden and progressive activist Ady Barkan that cut and spliced together words that Barkan never said, making it seem like Biden was directly responding to a question about defunding the police, when in fact the back and forth is more complicated (Scalise took down the clip and said he was wrong to have shared it, though he stood by the message attacking Biden.)
On Twitter, Scavino posted a 2011 interview on California-news outlet KBAK that made it falsely appear as if Biden had fallen asleep during an interview (John Dabkovitch, KBAK’s co-anchor at the time, called it a “fake” in a message on Twitter; the interview was actually with singer Harry Belafonte.)
On Monday, a Twitter account for the Trump campaign, @TrumpWarRoom, posted a tweet that took Biden’s remarks wildly out of context making it seem like the Democratic nominee said “You won't be safe in Joe Biden's America,” when in fact he was quoting Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.
In an apparent attempt to troll Twitter and Biden, multiple other members of the Trump campaign tweeted out the misleading video
Earlier this month, Trump shared a tweet about Biden from a now-suspended account that contained Russian propaganda; Trump’s campaign has also spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on ads that promote the false claim that Biden wants to “defund the police,” a proposal he said repeatedly he does not endorse (Facebook has not fact-checked the ads because it says politicians are exempt from its rules.)
Crucial quote
The Trump campaign called the tweet taking Biden’s comments out of context a “joke.”
Key background
After years of taking a laid back approach to managing misinformation and being sharply criticized for it in 2016, a pivotal election year, Twitter and Facebook have begun to crack down in the months leading up to the 2020 election. Both social media platforms have placed warning labels on multiple Trump posts and fact checked others, including several for spreading misinformation about Covid-19. The latest affront against Biden — from the Trump campaign, Scalise, and Scavino — represents a new stage in the presidential race, with Biden solely in the crosshairs of Trump and his allies’ messages containing misinformation.
Chief critic
“They keep stooping lower and lower,” Belafonte said Monday, after finding out Scavino had tweeted out the manipulated video of him. “A technical glitch in an interview I did nine years ago now becomes another one of their lies. More of their fake news.”
What to watch for
Biden has yet to have a tweet fact-checked by Twitter, a campaign official told Forbes.
Big number
76%. The percentage of IT leaders that are concerned deepfakes — doctored videos that look exactly like the real person — will be used to spread disinformation in the election, according to new study from Tessian, a security software company.
Further reading
Rep. Scalise Admits He ‘Shouldn’t Have’ Shared Doctored Biden Clip, But Doubles Down On Message (Forbes)
