A doctored video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in which the congresswoman appears to speak slowly with slurred words may be just the beginning when it comes to deceptive media content Americans can expect as the 2020 election approaches, ABC News reports.
So far, the video sharing site YouTube is the only major social media platform that has removed the video altogether, with Facebook and Twitter each maintaining that such content does not inherently violate their terms of service.
A spokesperson for Facebook said their fact-checking partners has categorized the video as “false,” and therefore they were “heavily reducing its distribution” in Facebook’s newsfeed.
“We remove things from Facebook that violate our Community Standards, and we don’t have a policy that stipulates that the information you post on Facebook must be true,” the company said in a prepared statement.
Twitter has so far declined to comment on the video specifically, but that platform’s terms of service bans content with “gratuitous gore” or “adult content,” though not that which is simply deceptive or untrue.
Ben Nimmo, an information defense fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Lab, has expressed concern that this type of content will likely ramp up in the face of the upcoming 2020 election.
“It doesn’t have to be massively complex… but it hits the crucial nerve,” he said. “There are people out there who will want to believe it and people out there who will want to share it because it suits their political beliefs…A fake doesn’t have to be 100 percent convincing; it just has to be convincing enough.”
Nimmo says that addressing this kind of challenge is something that will need to happen consistently in elections from now on.
WATCH: CNN’s Anderson Cooper grills Facebook executive over fake Pelosi video https://t.co/kXhfmMcgDM pic.twitter.com/0UdvF1eIqY
— The Hill (@thehill) May 26, 2019
As reported by Talking Points Memo , Republicans, including President Donald Trump himself, were quick to capitalize on the viral buzz around Pelosi, piling onto the emerging narrative that she was suffering from a lack of mental clarity. In a press conference on Thursday, the president described the speaker as “deteriorating” and said that she has “lost it.”
Additionally, Trump shared on Twitter a video compilation put together by Fox Business where Pelosi was shown in a variety of unflattering clips in which she appeared to stumble over her words. The show’s hosts debated Pelosi’s mental state.
All in all, the Pelosi video presents an unsettling example of just how quickly and effectively deceptive content can not only make the rounds on social media, but also drive the national conversation of major media outlets and politicians, up to and including the president.
