Social-Media
Republican chief is posting bogus footage of injured people on Twitter.
Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) 's Sunday tweet showing activist Ady Barkan's video got Twitter's manipulated internet mark. Barkan has ALS and talks with voice support. In the film, a dialogue between Barkan and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, Barkan asks, How do we believe that we should divert any of the funds? The version Scalise tweeted reads in the words for the police, at the end of the query, the words Barkan said in a different form earlier in the video.
A Twitter representative stated in an e-mail to The Verge that the tweet was classified "based on our Fake and Distorted Media Strategy."
There's a clip here of @AdyBarkan, who has ALS and speaks via voice assistance, asking Biden about "re-directing" public safety funding. The clip alters the quote. It splices "for police" into it, using Barkan's artificial voice. https://t.co/WKkbRzlrXF https://t.co/mUysm9YDeQ pic.twitter.com/uofqi9428E
— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) August 30, 2020
In the original film, Barkan asks Biden what he feels should be done about police brutality. We should reduce the duties allocated to the police and shift more of the resources for the police to mental health care and affordable housing, he added. Later in the film, he says, Do we accept that any of the funds should be redirected? To which Biden replies, yes. The shortened version of the clip in Scalise 's tweet, inserting the words for the police, at the end of the sentence, makes it look that Barkan asks Biden to fully disburse the police, a stance that Biden said he does not endorse.
Scalise spokesperson Lauren Fine said in an e-mail to The Verge on Sunday that it was obvious in the video that Barkan asked if Biden was available to divert support from the police.
Obviously, for a one-minute Twitter video containing a few brief excerpts, we simplified it to the core of what he was asking, as is standard procedure with TV and social media posts, no matter the speaker; we combined the police segment with Barkan's final question with clarification because we couldn't have a whole 3-minute clip in a one-minute montage," Fine said.
We agree that Biden's stance and reaction is clear regardless: when asked twice, he says yeah he's open to redirecting money away from the police, and that's obvious in our video.
A Twitter spokesman did not comment about what the "manipulated" term warranted directly in Scalise 's tweet. But if the video was awarded a doctorate, it would breach the guidelines of the social media site, which states that it is more likely to take action ... On more severe ways of modification, such as fully digital audio or video or material that has been proposed (spliced and reordered, slowed down) to modify the context.
Social media sites have attempted to censor falsified posts, including "deep-fake" videos, with differing degrees of effectiveness. For example, Twitter 's policy would not extend to images that have been edited in ways that do not radically change their context, such as color-corrected videos or retouched pictures.
Scalise's tweet seemed to have limited interaction as of Sunday afternoon, with no retweets in the counter at the bottom of the post. In response to a survey by The Verge, a Twitter spokesman pointed to its distorted media policies, which notes that Twitter can, among other items, decrease the exposure of a tweet, which prohibits it from being suggested.
Twitter has also branded some of President Trump's tweets with the "manipulated media" tag, including a June tweet that distorted footage of two children playing to indicate that one was chasing the other, and to imitate CNN's chryon style to make it seem like the clip was airing on the cable network (it didn't).
As of Sunday afternoon, the video in Scalise 's tweet had more than 835,000 views.
