How Misleading Videos Are Trailing Biden as He Battles Age Doubts

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/21/us/politics/biden-age-videos.html

How Misleading Videos Are Trailing Biden as He Battles Age Doubts

A flurry of recent clips, many of them edited or lacking context, laid bare a major challenge for the president as he tries to persuade voters he has the energy for a second term.

How Misleading Videos Are Trailing Biden as He Battles Age Doubts

A flurry of recent clips, many of them edited or lacking context, laid bare a major challenge for the president as he tries to persuade voters he has the energy for a second term.

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A photo of President Biden wearing sunglasses and departing an airplane.

In the past few weeks, misleading videos of President Biden’s public appearances have gone viral online. Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

Katie GlueckTiffany HsuAng Li

By Katie Glueck, Tiffany Hsu and Ang Li

June 21, 2024

President Biden has many adversaries in this year’s election. There are his Republican opponent, former President Donald J. Trump, and the independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

And then there is the distorted, online version of himself, a product of often misleading videos that play into and reinforce voters’ longstanding concerns about his age and abilities.

In the last two weeks, conservative news outlets, the Republican National Committee and the Trump team have circulated videos of Mr. Biden that lacked important context and twisted mundane moments to paint him in an unflattering light. Among other things, they created the impression that the president:

Wandered off during a meeting with other Group of 7 leaders, an image that The New York Post ran on its front page (he was greeting paratroopers)

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A video edited and shared by The New York Post on X claimed to show President Biden wandering off during a Group of 7 gathering. The New York Times annotated additional footage showing Mr. Biden giving a thumbs-up to some paratroopers.

Was escorted out of an event by his wife, Jill Biden, while President Emmanuel Macron of France stayed behind to greet veterans (a longer video showed Mr. Biden greeting veterans before his exit and then walking out with Dr. Biden)

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Footage shared on social media by the Republican National Committee appeared to show Jill Biden leading President Biden out of a D-Day event while President Emmanuel Macron of France greeted veterans. Longer footage shows Mr. Biden also greeting veterans and walking side by side with the first lady.CreditCredit...The New York Times

Struggled to sit down at a D-Day commemoration ceremony (after seemingly hesitating for an uncomfortable few seconds, he eventually took a seat when the next speaker was announced, as did others), an image that spawned wild and false claims. It also generated approximately 12,000 mentions across social media platforms — an unusual level of attention — and 372 English-language articles, according to Chiara Vercellone, a senior staff analyst for NewsGuard, a company that monitors online misinformation

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The Republican National Committee shared a clip that sought to show President Biden awkwardly crouching. The full video shows him eventually sitting down after the next speaker was announced.

Announcer: Distinguished guests, please welcome the Hon. Lloyd J. Austin. Distinguished guests, please welcome the Hon. Lloyd J. Austin III, Secretary of Defense of the United States of America.

The Republican National Committee shared a clip that sought to show President Biden awkwardly crouching. The full video shows him eventually sitting down after the next speaker was announced.

A New York Times review of these videos found that some scenes were cut short and taken out of context, while other clips were cropped in a way that omitted crucial details when compared with additional footage.

Campaigns and political groups have long disseminated damaging videos of their opponents, sometimes misleadingly edited ones.

But the flurry of clips released this month is a fresh reminder of the steep, multifront and evolving challenge that Mr. Biden, 81, faces in convincing voters that he is spry enough to serve another term. As polls show a close race, many Americans harbor doubts about his fitness — and selectively sliced snippets from his routine public appearances are fueling those worries and sending conspiracy theories spiraling across social media.

“They’ll go around the world twice before the truth can even wake up, and in many cases people never hear what the truth is,” said former Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, a rare Republican critic of Mr. Trump’s who is supporting Mr. Biden. “If you see those and that’s all you see, you’re going to walk away thinking there’s something wrong, like something’s going on, because you haven’t seen the truth and the correction, so yeah, I do think it’s damaging.”

Driven by clips of Mr. Biden’s appearances at high-profile events commemorating Juneteenth and D-Day, posts on the social media platform X concerning his age and mental competence surged nearly 2,000 percent over the last two weeks compared with average activity, according to data from the firm PeakMetrics.

Some of the videos of Mr. Biden circulating during this year’s campaign are clearly manipulated to make him look old and confused. Others cut out vital context to portray him in a negative light, a process sometimes known as a “cheap fake” because it requires little expense or technological skill to create.

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And some are simply brief, unedited clips of an octogenarian president who is an uneven public speaker prone to verbal miscues, who shuffles at times (his doctor has said he has a “stiffened gait,” partly because of arthritis) and who is otherwise showing signs of his age, his greatest and most persistent political liability.

The videos that are misleadingly cropped “follow a formula,” said Bhaskar Chakravorti, the dean of global business at the Fletcher School at Tufts University.

“They are low-cost and super easy to produce by clipping a video or narrowing the frame to eliminate or change the context, no fancy tech or A.I. needed,” he said. “Biden’s actual visuals, especially his physical unsteadiness and measured and stiff gait in a cropped frame, make the cheap fakes easier to produce and distribute rapidly. No question, we’ll see this spike.”

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A Marquette Law School poll released last month found that 79 percent of voters saw Mr. Biden as too old to be president, while 54 percent said the same about Mr. Trump. At 78 years old, the former president has had many of his own verbal stumbles, alongside his extensive record of promoting conspiracy theories and lies.

Charles Franklin, the director of that poll, said the video clips fed a public perception that Mr. Biden was too old.

“People that already are concerned about his age are quick to accept what they see in the video, and not question whether that’s selectively edited,” Mr. Franklin said. “But seeing image after image of him, or video after video of him, over the last few years, also boosts the perception that he’s too old.”

Mr. Biden has long been the subject of deceptive videos, including during his successful 2020 race.

But as he struggles with weak job approval nearly four months before Election Day, there are signs that years of damaging clips — however misleading many of them are — pose a real political risk.

“This isn’t a new narrative, it builds on an existing one, which tends to be much more effective,” said Claire Wardle, a co-founder of the Information Futures Lab at Brown University.

Political campaigns are limited in their abilities to respond to true misinformation online, in part because social media companies have struggled to track and react to huge volumes of fake or manipulated content. And all of the fact checks in the world can go only so far in a polarized country where basic realities are often filtered through a partisan lens.

Still, the Biden team is taking to the digital campaign trail and the White House podium to push back on misleading clips.

“Trump’s extreme rants look deranged and unhinged without any editing,” said Mia Ehrenberg, a spokeswoman for the Biden campaign, arguing that Republicans were “distorting footage” because they were struggling to effectively attack the president’s policy record.

“Voters deserve accurate information to inform their choice this November, and our campaign will be vigilant in calling out these lies when we see them,” she added.

The Biden campaign has an active rapid response effort underway across social media platforms and is also working to stoke questions about Mr. Trump’s mental fitness, sometimes seeming to echo Republican language about Mr. Biden.

“Here is a montage of Donald Trump getting confused, lost, wandering off, and waving to nobody,” a campaign social media account posted on Thursday, along with clips of Mr. Trump seemingly being redirected or nudged by others including his former vice president, Mike Pence.

And an interdepartmental team meets weekly to prepare for the potential effects of artificial intelligence and misinformation on the election, according to the campaign.

The White House has also weighed in. In response to questions at a news conference on Monday, Karine Jean-Pierre, Mr. Biden’s press secretary, addressed several of the clips of him that have drawn attention online, calling them “cheap fakes” and bad-faith efforts to mislead.

Mr. Biden’s allies hope that next week’s debate will offer Americans a fuller picture of his capabilities — and a reminder of Mr. Trump’s penchant for falsehoods and outrageous statements. The videos of Mr. Biden that Republicans are pushing may also have the unintended effect of lowering expectations for his debate performance.

Teddy Goff, who served as the digital director for former President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign, said Republicans had overplayed their hand before, including in the lead-up to Mr. Biden’s generally well-received State of the Union address.

“It was a great performance by any standard, but I think it was even better because the Republicans had created this expectation that the guy had a foot in the grave,” Mr. Goff said. He added, “People are going to see actual footage that contradicts that, and they’re going to be pleasantly surprised and constantly be reminded that the president is in a lot hardier shape than they’ve been told.”

Republican reliance on misleading imagery, he said, offers the Biden campaign an opening to “plant a seed of doubt in the minds of voters, every time you see an image or a video of Biden where he appears to be, you know, in bad shape, it’s quite possible that the Republicans are lying to you.”

Republicans argue that Democrats are too quick to dismiss unflattering — but unaltered — clips as “misinformation.”

“Cheap fake: any unedited video of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline that the Biden administration does not want the public to see,” read a post from a Trump campaign account.

Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, accused the Biden camp of suggesting that “anyone who clearly sees Biden acting like a brain-dead dope” must be part of a conspiracy.

Patrick Ruffini, a Republican pollster who is not working for Mr. Trump, said that concerns about Mr. Biden’s age and mental fitness amounted to the most “sticky” narrative in the campaign — and that the viral videos made it harder for Mr. Biden to shake.

“I don’t think it’s going to go away fully,” he said, though he acknowledged that the debate presented an opportunity for Mr. Biden. “When you see just so many multiple examples of this in a row, perception becomes reality at some point.”

That is often the effect of “cheap fakes,” said Britt S. Paris, an assistant professor at Rutgers University who helped coin the term.

“It gets stuck in people’s minds because it proliferates,” she said. “There’s so many of them that people are like: ‘Oh yeah. I guess that was true.’”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5549787&forum_id=2...id#47805757)

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Kevin

Manhattan

June 21

Yes, there are edited videos that make him seem old and, at times, confused.

There are also unedited videos that make him seem old and, at times, confused.

14 Replies733 RecommendShareFlag

Adriana Gorbaty commented June 21

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Adriana Gorbaty

Los Angeles

June 21

Telling people they are not seeing what they are seeing won't work.

6 Replies633 RecommendShareFlag

Mike commented June 21

M

Mike

Chicago

June 21

I appreciate your effort, but the unedited videos are not helping your argument.

1 Reply573 RecommendShareFlag

John C commented June 21

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John C

USA

June 21

The screen door is open, it was apparent even back in 2020. Joe Biden should be enjoying his retirement. There’s no requirement for him to run again and it’s crazy he’s doing so.

8 Replies492 RecommendShareFlag

mitch commented June 21

M

mitch

New York

June 21

This article is a bit misleading, and it dovetails with the Biden campaign's tendency to duck the real issue.

Obviously, there are lots of fake videos and they make him look much worse. But the problem is that he doesn't look so sprightly in the unedited videos either. That's why this narrative sticks.

I think too many Democrats are in denial, and that starts with Biden. His vanity and stubbornness are putting the nation in peril.

8 Replies458 RecommendShareFlag

Victor commented June 21

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Victor

Montgomery, AL

June 21

Was the video of Obama guiding Biden off the stage at the California fundraiser manipulated? Just asking.

10 Replies431 RecommendShareFlag

George commented June 21

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George

New York

June 21

Many of these videos are neither misleading or fake. They are unedited, taken from pool cameras and they are concerning. Joe Biden looks like what he is, a feeble old man who clearly is not up to another four year term as president. The videos could not be any clearer and it’s simply lying to claim they are fake. They are the sad truth and he needs to go to the videotape, then drop out of this race.

375 RecommendShareFlag

The Gray commented June 21

T

The Gray

NYC

June 21

You can take cool photos of Biden, in flattering angles, and slick hair and shades all you want, but at the end of the day, he's still frail and has zero energy. The videos in question were not taken "out of context", in fact, it's even more painful to watch in full length. I voted for Biden as a liberal but this time around, who can vote for him with pride and confidence? Because of the "fear" of Trump? One should vote because their values align with the candidates and what the candidate proposes he/she will do for the country, not because of party.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5549787&forum_id=2...id#47805764)

Lol oh ok whew!

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5549787&forum_id=2...id#47806977)

Case closed

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5549787&forum_id=2...id#47807404)