Facebook is refusing to remove a fake video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that has been doctored to make it appear as if she was drunk or drugged.
The video, which has since been viewed more than two million times, shows Pelosi slurring her words and appearing to stare off vacantly into space as reporters ask her questions during a Capitol Hill conference.
Taken from a May 20 press briefing, the video of Pelosi was found to have been digitally slowed down to make it appear as if the prominent Democrat was intoxicated. Undoctored footage of the same conference shows Pelosi speaking and acting normally.
Twitter, YouTube and TikTok have all removed the video from their platforms citing a breach of their respective media manipulation policies, however Facebook has so-far refused.
The video, which has since been viewed more than two million times, shows Pelosi slurring her words and appearing to stare off vacantly into space as reporters ask her questions during a Capitol Hill conference
Instead, the Mark Zuckerberg-owned social media platform has applied a fact-check label to the minute-long clip, warning that the scenes depicted are ‘partly false’.
‘The information in this post is a mix of true and false statements or it could simply be incomplete. In some cases, the information is misleading,’ the full warning attached to the clip reads.
The video, which in its caption claims that Pelosi is ‘blowed out of her mind’, can however still be viewed and widely shared.
A similarly false and heavily edited video of Pelosi went viral on Facebook in May 2019 showing her appearing to slur her speech and stumble over her words, as if she was under the influence of alcohol.
Pelosi slammed Facebook for refusing to remove the video at the time. The social media site again placed a warning label on the footage but declined to remove it from public view.
In the latest instance, visual forensic expert and professor at the University of California Berkeley Hany Farid confirmed to CNN that the footage had been edited and slowed down.
‘This appears to be the same type of manipulation [of] the Speaker Pelosi that made the rounds last year,’ Farid said.
The professor said he believed the video should be removed from the site because of a breach of Facebook’s manipulated media policy.
However, Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone told the network Sunday night that the video did not break its policies in a way that would warrant it being removed.
The video, which in its caption claims that Pelosi is ‘blowed out of her mind’, can still be viewed and widely shared
Instead of removing it, the Mark Zuckerberg-owned social media platform has applied a fact-check label to the minute-long clip, warning that the scenes depicted are ‘partly false’
Taken from a May 20 press briefing, the video of Pelosi was found to have been digitally slowed down to make it appear as if the prominent Democrat was intoxicated. Undoctored footage of the same conference shows Pelosi speaking and acting normally
‘Following an incident over a year ago with a previous video of Speaker Pelosi, we took a number of key steps, making it very clear to people on Facebook when a third-party fact-checker determines content to be false and updating our policy to make explicit the kind of manipulated media we will remove,’ Stone said.
The spokesman added that when a video is marked as false on Facebook, it’s promoted significantly less by the site’s algorithms and users who share the images are sent a notification to flag the fact-check.
The video was first uploaded to Facebook by user Will Allen with the caption, ‘This is unbelievable, she is blowed out of her mind, I bet this gets taken down!’
Allen shared a copy of the video that was originally posted on TikTok. The TikTok video was originally uploaded to the site in May and only had 37,000 views.
TikTok confirmed that it had removed the video for violating its ‘synthetic media policy’.
‘Our users value seeing authentic content on TikTok, and we do, too, which is why we remove harmful misleading and deceptive content as we become aware of it,’ a company spokesperson told CNN.
Copies of the video also circulated on YouTube and Twitter. YouTube said it had removed three versions of the edited footage for violating its policies on manipulated media.
Twitter confirmed it also removed a version of the video that had been viewed more than 300,000 times.
On Facebook, the video was viewed so many times it’s likely to renew scrutiny about the platform’s perceived failures to tackle misinformation
The video, which in its caption claims that Pelosi is ‘blowed out of her mind’, has since been viewed more than two million times
On Facebook, the video was viewed so many times it’s likely to renew scrutiny about the platform’s perceived failures to tackle misinformation.
Earlier this week, Holocaust survivors around the world lent their voices to a campaign calling for Mark Zuckerberg to remove posts on Facebook that claim the Nazi genocide was a hoax.
Coordinated by the New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (JMCAG), the #NoDenyingIt campaign posted dozens videos to Facebook urging the CEO to take action.
Zuckerberg previously prompted outrage with comments he made in 2018 to the tech website Recode, saying that posts denying the Nazi annihilation of 6 million Jews would not necessarily be removed.
He said he did not think Holocaust deniers were 'intentionally' getting it wrong, and that as long as posts were not calling for harm or violence, even offensive content should be protected.
After an outcry, Zuckerberg, who is Jewish himself, clarified that while he personally found 'Holocaust denial deeply offensive', he believed that 'the best way to fight offensive bad speech is with good speech.'
The call from the JMCAG comes as Facebook faces an advertising boycott by more than 500 companies over hate speech on the site as part of the #StopHateForProfit campaign.
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