Concerns have been raised among political experts about whether recent video footage of President Joe Biden could be the precursor to more social media censorship.
As the election season continues into the presidential contest this November, the White House is calling out "cheap fakes" and "deep fakes," as Fox News reported.
The Biden administration has been adamant that those "fake" videos are responsible for the negative reflection on the president.
Namely, the White House is pushing back against a purported showing of Biden in declining mental acuity due to what appears to be extreme confusion on stage.
What This Could Bring
A conservative tech expert counters that the videos are genuinely troubling, as is the pushback.
According to the expert, Biden's campaign pushback appears to be part of an "election buzzword" effort that could be engineered to put pressure on media platforms to "take action" against it.
"The discredited right-wing critics of President Biden who spread other debunked lies, including that the 2020 election was stolen, are clearly threatened by the wide range of nonpartisan fact-checkers that have pulled back the curtain on the cheap fake smears they’re forced to rely on, since the last thing they want to discuss is Joe Biden’s agenda to cut taxes for working families and keep bringing violent crime to historic lows," White House spokesperson Andrew Bates told Fox News Digital.
"Their panicked reaction to mainstream reporters, including at The Washington Post, NBC News, and PolitiFact, citing misinformation experts taking anti-Biden cheap fakes apart, says more than we ever could," Bates added.
In recent weeks, videos of Biden from a variety of events have appeared to depict him as "confused." His voice is seen in one video speaking to a parachuter while turning away from the group of world leaders at a D-Day anniversary event in France.
He appeared to be uncertain about the appropriate time to settle down in another video, and at a fundraising event this week, he was led off the stage by former President Obama in another video.
On Tuesday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre reiterated that these videos were "cheap fakes." The Media Manipulation Case Book defines "altered media" as "media that does not necessitate advanced technology," such as "photoshopping (including face swapping), lookalikes, as well as video speeding and slowing."
The term was employed in a few news articles as early as 2019, but it was used substantially more frequently this week in response to the videos of Biden that were posted on social media.
"It's also very insulting to the folks, the viewers who are watching it. And so we believe we have to call that out. We've been calling them ‘cheap fakes, Jean-Pierre told MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace on Tuesday.
"That is something that came directly from the media outlets in calling it that, the fact-checkers... calling it that. And so we're certainly going to be really, really clear about that as well. And calling it out from where we are, from where we stand."
