When we list the groups that should be embarrassed by the Great Cheapfakes News Cycle of 2024, let's not leave out the alleged experts on detecting misinformation. It's not just that some of them wound up misleading people themselves—sadly, that's no longer novel. It's that they did it in one of the ways they spent years highlighting as an online hazard.
For those of you who have forgotten the cheapfakes caper, here's a quick review. Last June, the media suddenly overflowed with stories about videos that seemed to show then-President Joe Biden detached from the events unfolding around him. These press reports dubbed the clips "cheapfakes," a term that became increasingly infamous after Biden's decline became undeniable.
This expression was not invented in the Biden era; it's a play on "deepfakes" that's been around at least as far back as 2019. It's a dumb word for a real phenomenon: photos or videos that mislead not with sophisticated new technologies but through such low-tech manipulations as cropping something important out of the frame or just mislabeling what we're watching. (Think of all the times that footage from other wars, or even from a video game, has been presented as a scene from Ukraine or Gaza.) In their simplest form, these videos were an example of another misinfo-hunting buzzword: malinformation, a term the Department of Homeland Security defines as material "based on fact, but used out of context." If a clip shows Biden with his eyes closed at a D-Day event, as though he had fallen asleep, but the full context reveals that he had merely shut them for a short period while listening to a translation, then presto! That's malinformation.
