Twitter slaps its 1st 'manipulated media' label on video of Joe Biden shared by Trump

(Image credit: Jonathan Bachman/Getty Images)

published 9 March 2020

Twitter announced last week that it will apply the label "manipulated media" to misleadingly edited or synthetic videos like deepfakes, and it used its new policy for the first time Sunday evening. The tagged post was from White House social media director Dan Scavino, and President Trump retweeted it for his 73 million followers.

The video in question shows Democratic presidential frontrunner Joe Biden saying "we can only re-elect Donald Trump" during a speech Saturday in Kansas City, Missouri. Biden's full sentence was: "We can only re-elect Donald Trump if in fact we get engaged in this circular firing squad here. It's gotta be a positive campaign."

"Twitter applied the label to Scavino's tweet at about 5 p.m. on Sunday evening, about 18 hours after Scavino first shared the video," The Washington Post reports. "The video had at least 5 million views and more than 21,000 retweets as of Sunday evening. Twitter's rollout of the new label was not without technical glitches, however. The label was not showing up when people searched for Scavino's tweet, though Twitter spokeswoman Katie Rosborough said it was appearing in individuals' timelines. She added the company is working on a fix."

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Twitter typically holds Trump's tweets and retweets to a looser standard, and Scavino protested that labeling the edited video was a step too far. "The video was NOT manipulated," he tweeted. Trump campaign officials and the Republican National Committee's spokeswoman also complained that changing the meaning of Biden's sentence by cutting it in half does not count as manipulation. Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates said with such tactics, Trump "has made it inescapably clear that he's terrified of Joe Biden." After all, he added, "Trump himself is so panicked about Joe Biden that he got himself impeached trying to force a foreign country to lie about him."

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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.