NEW YORK (AP) — President Joe Biden’s straightforward act of sitting down during the 80th anniversary commemoration of D-Day in Normandy, France, attracted more attention in some circles than the ceremony itself, as social media users shared an edited version of the clip to falsely claim he reached for a nonexistent chair.
The clip was the first of at least three out-of-context or edited videos that were widely shared in less than two weeks in June to reinforce the narrative that Biden was mentally and physically unfit for office.
Twisting real-life moments to make an opponent look bad has long been common practice in politics, but the recent spate of misleading videos — which garnered millions of views and were picked up by right-wing outlets around the world — shows how the reach of social media and genuine concerns about Biden’s age have made this tactic particularly effective in 2024.
Experts say voters can expect both Republicans and Democrats to utilize unflattering, out-of-context moments to brand the other side’s presidential candidates as feeble, confused or senile – especially given their ages of 81 and 78, respectively. In fact, edited and doctored clips of former President Donald Trump are also circulating.
“Any misinformation that appears to reinforce or reinforce perceptions or prevailing narratives, whether they are accurate or not, is very effective,” says Erik Nisbet, a professor at Northwestern University who studies media, public opinion and public policy in democracy and elections.
At the G7 summit in Italy, where Biden traveled after Normandy, a clip of the president watching a skydiving demonstration was cropped to make it look like he had walked away for no reason. A wider view of the video shows him greeting paratroopers who had just landed. And at a fundraiser in Los Angeles last weekend, a pause as Biden left the stage to cheers was used to claim the president froze, while Biden’s campaign team claimed he only stopped to accept the applause.
The clips were particularly effective in raising doubts about Biden’s competence, says Nisbet, because Biden is the oldest sitting president the United States has ever had and because it is more tough for him to move around in his offices today than it was in the past.
Dr. Kevin O’Connor, Biden’s physician, wrote in a February memo after the president’s annual physical that he “remains fit for duty” and that his stiff gait was the result of arthritic changes in his spine. He said Biden had reported additional hip pain and had begun using a novel device for his sleep apnea, but he was showing no signs of a stroke, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s or other similar conditions.
After the fundraising clip went viral, Biden campaign spokesman James Singer criticized such negative characterizations as a tactic by those who are “so afraid of losing to Joe Biden that they will make up anything” to distract voters from Trump’s misdeeds.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called the videos “cheap fakes” in a press conference, a term used to describe videos that were edited using low-cost video editing software rather than artificial intelligence.
Trump’s campaign team has amplified the clips even further, circulating a meme that defines a “cheap fake” as “any unedited video of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline that the Biden administration wants to keep from the public.”
Experts say these attacks can be iterative, with influencers and social media campaigns trying to outdo each other.
“The attention economy within conservative media helps perpetuate these circulation cycles and these kinds of misinformation and campaign messages,” says AJ Bauer, an assistant professor at the University of Alabama who studies conservative news.
For example, shortly after the G7 summit in Italy, the Republican National Committee released an abridged version of Biden’s video with the headline “What is Biden doing?” The RNC post was subsequently shared by right-wing media outlets, including syndicated stations from the Sinclair Broadcast Group and the New York Post, which embedded the RNC post in its story.
That clip was also picked up by foreign publications, including the tabloid The Sun in the UK and the Corriere della Sera newspaper in Italy. A pro-Trump super PAC highlighted the latter coverage on social media as proof that “the world is laughing at us.”
Joshua Tucker, a politics professor and co-director of the Center for Social Media and Politics at New York University, said Republicans are likely to run aggressively because of concerns about Biden’s age, but they should expect Democrats to push back against Trump, who is only a few years younger.
“Given Trump’s behavior lately, the RNC is playing with fire a little bit here,” Tucker said.
Biden’s campaign responded by attacking Trump through its rapid response account on social media platform X. On Thursday, it released a montage of clips that allegedly show Trump “confused, disoriented, wandering around, and not waving to anyone.”
The post, taken out of context, followed other attempts by the left to utilize videos to portray Trump as confused, senile or attention-seeking.
For example, earlier this month, social media users seized on an image of Trump holding Donald Trump Jr.’s hand at a rally last fall in Hialeah, Florida, as supposed proof that the former president needed to be escorted off the stage. The original video captured the moment in full context, showing father and son only briefly shaking hands in greeting as Trump walked away unaided.
The fact that these images and videos are simply edited or misrepresented, rather than manipulated with editing software or artificial intelligence, gives them even more power at a time when Americans fear high-tech fakes, experts say.
“It’s convincing because it’s not fabricated,” Nisbet said. “It’s simply distorted visual clues to create a false impression of what happened.”
At next week’s debate – the first between the two leading presidential candidates this cycle – both Trump and Biden will be under pressure to show that they remain robust, fit and fit to serve as president.
Both men have made public verbal slip-ups, messing up names, dates or facts. Health experts warn that such confusions are common and can be made worse by stress. They also point out that some degree of cognitive aging is normal, including a delay in memory. And Biden has battled a stutter since childhood, a challenge that critics have used to attack and ridicule him.
Experts agree that most voters are unlikely to switch to another candidate because of misleading videos. But such misinformation could further reinforce people’s beliefs or dampen their enthusiasm for political participation, they warn.
“This election is not about persuasion,” Nisbet said. “It’s about mobilization – the Democrats are mobilizing Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters, Trump and the Republicans are doing the same. And it’s going to be a close election.”
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Associated Press writer Stephen Groves in Washington contributed to this report.
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