This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss Joe Biden "cheapfakes," the idea of porn-addicted tribes, and feedback.
EMANUEL: Don’t ask me why, but at some point this week I ended up scrolling the Twitter account of conservative commentator Erik Erikson. While scrolling, I saw a tweet of a very short clip from a White House press conference in which press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that videos of Joe Biden looking lost and confused are “deepfakes.”
The clip, which has gone viral in Let’s Go Brandon circles, has since broken containment, and I understand why. Say what you will about whether the media, especially right wing talking heads and cable news, are treating Biden’s age fairly or not, nothing I’ve seen online and certainly not the clips in question have anything to do with “deepfakes,” which involves using AI to manipulate video, namely to face swap someone so they appear in a video they didn’t actually appear in.
It’s an outrageous and misleading statement for the press secretary to make and something I considered covering, so the first thing I did is look up the full press briefing to get full context for how, why, and when she made the statement. Doing this made it immediately clear that the viral clip of Jean-Pierre was itself misleading. As you can see if you watch the full video (this link should take you to the relevant spot) the exchange starts when a reporter asks Jean-Pierre about “a rash of videos that have been edited to make the president appear especially frail or mentally confused.” These edited, misleading videos do in fact exist, and have been fact checked multiple times by numerous outlets, including the Associated Press.