The Republican National Committee, conservative media outlets and right-wing influencers are peddling deceptively edited videos that they claim show "proof" of President Joe Biden's alleged physical infirmity, according to an NBC News report. These fraudulent clips purport to show the president wandering off, freezing up and sitting on non-existent chairs.
Independent fact checkers and Biden campaign officials have sought to expose the videos, which in some cases entail cutting off a few seconds at the end or trimming off the edges of the image to present an entirely different story from reality. One video that purports to show Biden struggling to find a chair, for example, was cut off right before he sat down at the same time as French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife.
Another video of Biden posing with other world leaders appears to show the president wandering off, but the original clip reveals that Biden was greeting a parachutist who had just landed as part of the ceremony.
The deceptive videos, circulated by outlets like the New York Post and Fox News, exploit voters' concerns about Biden's age, which Donald Trump and other Republicans have consistently used as a campaign attack. This has created headaches for fact-checkers, whose detailed analysis inevitably struggle to get as many eyes as the original, viral videos.
Major social media platforms are not helping. Many of them have eliminated the few existing checks and balances on the spread of false and misleading information, under pressure from Republicans. And the people behind the so-called "cheapfake videos," named for the lack of sophisticated editing techniques used to make them, are unapologetic.
“It’s outrageous that the words ‘cheap fake’ [are] even being used," said Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt. "There’s nothing cheap or fake about these videos. They are real clips of Joe Biden acting bizarrely."
