Tweets His Own

Twitter-video clip

posted by Dan Scavino, White House director of social media and viewed 6 million times shows Joe Biden saying: "We cannot win this election. Excuse me, we can only re-elect Donald Trump."What Joe Biden actually said: can only re-elect Donald Trump if in fact we get engaged in this circular firing squad here. It's got to be a positive campaign.” 

Truth is going to be elusive in this 2020 election year. With sophisticated artificial intelligence software, able to mimic facial movement and voice duplication with uncanny accuracy, it is fairly easy to create totally fabricated audio-visual “proof” to sustain the wildest conspiracy theorist. Even less sophisticated systems can replicate reasonably credible fakes with software that is readily available to almost anyone. Putting fake words in the mouth of an opponent is so easy.

Even little manipulations, like a viral video of an apparently drunk Nancy Pelosi slurring her speech last May, have an impact. “The video has been viewed millions of times on Facebook and was amplified by the president’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, who shared the video Thursday night on Twitter. ‘What is wrong with Nancy Pelosi?’ Mr. Giuliani said in a tweet that has since been deleted. ‘Her speech pattern is bizarre.’

“Mr. Trump himself tweeted a separate video of Ms. Pelosi on Thursday night [5/23], an edited clip from Fox Business that spliced together moments from a 20-minute news conference and emphasized points where she had stumbled on her words. ‘PELOSI STAMMERS THROUGH NEWS CONFERENCE,’ the president tweeted.” New York Times, May 24^th. Pelosi was not inebriated; the video was simply slowed down to distort her speech. Both Facebook and YouTube pulled the video down, labeling it as “false.”

Add a little tracking software, able to recognize words and concepts that cater to individual biases and vulnerabilities, to a program that can actually and automatically change words in a disinformation-driven social media, text and email campaign to match those predispositions… in real time on an on-going effort to instill confusion and disruption to the American political process. Keep minorities from voting, focusing on the “hopelessness” of their votes. Create bald-faced lies against political candidates that you want to destroy. And do it by the millions of individual communications creating a virtually unstoppable flood of falsehoods. 

Applying a whack-a-mole system that reconfigures the instant any one component is disabled, and you have a perfect example of the Russian interference that began serious during the 2016 presidential campaign, an effort that has only ramped up since then. A very, very pro-Putin’s Russia effort to bolster Trump’s electability. And as much as the President may deny this reality, every one of our intelligence agencies, the relevant Congressional committee findings and even the core of the Mueller Report sustain this asymmetrical political warfare by one of America’s staunched foes. 

But what really enables this violation of our entire election process, even more than giving the rich a disproportionate power legitimately to “buy” elections (the controversial Citizens United Supreme Court decision), is the justification from the highest office in the land that it is OK to lie, and if you repeat that lie often enough (with help from media mouthpieces like Breitbart and Fox News), to watch your lies disseminated through social media accepted as “truth” by tens of millions of Americans. Without the White House supporting conspiracy theorists (like white supremacist groups, Deep State or QAnon adherents), without the bullying and mendacious vitriol from Donald Trump himself, defeating fake news would not be as challenging as it has become.

Even understanding the bias in The Washington Post reportage of the Trump administration, their detailed fact-checking remains highly credible, a reality totally sustained as Trump stumbles to contain the fears surrounding the coronavirus… as the stock market totally reflects. Nobody of substance believes him. Even his own followers. As of this writing, “In 1,095 days, President Trump has made 16,241 false or misleading claims.” The Post. That’s just the President, not including the falsehoods emanating from those reporting to him. There are so many lies that even the worst of the worst rarely get singled out as relevant anymore. We seem to have been inoculated against his falsehoods. Trump knows that floods of disinformation cannot be stopped by a few sandbags of fact-checking. Hard to take words back as if they were never uttered. Too many feel that it is the fact-checkers who are lying.

So, let’s get back to that little quote at the top of this blog, one tweet in a tsunami of White House supported false or misleading statements. “Facebook, more than 24 hours after Donald Trump shared the White House’s video of a Joe Biden speech that had been edited to make it seem as if the former VP viewed Trump’s re-election as inevitable, added a warning label to the video saying that it included ‘partly false information.’

“The move by Facebook to add the fact-checking overlay Monday to the video comes after Twitter applied a ‘manipulated media’ tag on the same edited clip — and after Biden’s campaign publicly lambasted Facebook for not taking similar action.

“‘Fact checkers rated this video as partly false, so we are reducing its distribution and showing warning labels with more context for people who see it, try to share it, or already have,’ Facebook said in a statement Monday [3/9].

“The clip, which was posted Saturday [3/7] evening by the White House’s director of social media and shared by Trump, was from Biden’s March 7 appearance at a rally in St. Louis, Mo.” Variety.com, March 9^th. Trump’s strategy has been to flood social media and traditional news outlets with falsehoods, always double down and attack anyone who contradicts his falsehoods even with indisputable facts, dominate the airways with all things Trump, and act as if those falsehoods were the truth. Trump’s exoneration by the vote of the GOP-dominated Senate has obviously only spurred Mr Trump to amp up the falsehoods with little fear for the consequences.

For many followers, they have accepted the majority of the falsehoods as facts and attributed the most obvious lies as messing with the mainstream media and his political opponents, baiting them to respond to their detriment (which only generates more coverage of Trump himself). His proclivity to lie is often written off as simply his style, embracing hyperbole as he has always done as a media celebrity. 

His simplistic answers to challenges to the economy, clearly happening as a result of the COVID-19 threat, veer toward “tax cuts” and income insurance, proposals that are now on the table. That he cut the budget for the CDC, eliminated the pandemic unit and so poo-pooed the coronavirus situation that he caused serious delays in necessary medical steps, made absurd promises that could never be kept, contradicting his own advisors, all seemed to slip from his consciousness. He preferred blaming the Dems and the oil war between Saudi Arabia and Russia.

Few pay any attention to most of Trump’s lies anymore, only pausing to reassess when a pandemic just might impact their own lives directly. His dollars in lieu of upping the medical solution won’t work. Is this the misstep that tanks his election efforts? Virtually no one remotely believes his “perfect plan” to stop the coronavirus from spreading further. His base already drained the shelves in their communities of hand sanitizer. Wall Street’s precipitous plunge combined with growing the oil-price war are the loudest voices crying, “you’re totally lying.”

              I’m Peter Dekom, and as Trump’s re-election faces incredible new threats, you can expect Russian interference and distorted social media efforts to double down.