A viral video appearing to show Jill Biden getting booed at an Eagles game in Philadelphia has been found to be a doctored clip.
The First Lady attended the Philadelphia NFL team’s game against the Dallas Cowboys on Sunday for cancer awareness night. She grew up watching the Eagles, having been raised in Willow Grove, just an hour’s drive from the Lincoln Financial Field.
During a rendition of the team’s anthem “Fly Eagles Fly”, Ms Biden stood in the centre of the field flanked by cancer patients, cancer survivors and their families as they all joined in the chant.
Video footage of the rallying chorus was shared on both the official Twitter accounts of the NFL and NBC’s Sunday Night Football and in both clips, the song went off without a hitch.
Later, however, a doctored version of Ms Biden’s appearance began making the rounds on social media. Multiple accounts on Twitter and YouTube shared the since-debunked fake clip, in which it seems to show Ms Biden getting raucously booed by fans at the Philadelphia stadium.
In the clip shared on the main NFL account, which was excitedly captioned, “Philly’s own @FLOTUS stands along cancer survivors to lead the “Fly Eagles Fly” fight song before #DALvsPHI,” they make no mention of the boos, as they cannot be heard in this original version of the event.
The origin of the doctored clip has yet to be unearthed, but Snopes.com reported that the angry crowd used in Ms Biden’s Eagles clip sounds like a separate instance where her husband, President Joe Biden, was booed at a football game in Tennessee.
“Our best guess was that the sound was taken from a TikTok video recorded at a 2021 football game hosted by The University of Tennessee,” the fact-checking site wrote, adding that the original source likely came from a video uploaded on 11 September 2021, which appeared to include the same audio from the doctored clip.
This is hardly the first time the Bidens have had to contend with deep-fakes circulating online.
Over the summer, a grainy – and fake – video of Mr Biden seeming to put the Medal of Honor improperly on a Vietnam veteran gained nearly one million views online, while years earlier when he was campaigning for president, his rival, Donald Trump, retweeted a doctored video of Mr Biden supposedly endorsing his re-election.
That clip, which prompted Twitter to use its “manipulated media” warning tag for a video for the first time, was later proven to be an edited down version of Mr Biden’s full remarks: “We can only re-elect Donald Trump if in fact we get engaged in this circular firing squad here.”
