Twitter flagged an inflammatory video by House Republican Whip Steve Scalise on Sunday for altering footage of a conversation between progressive activist Ady Barkan and Joe Biden. The video is now labeled as “manipulated media” in a tweet from Scalise, though remains online.
The inflammatory video pulls in out-of-context quotes from a number of Democrats and activists, but appears to have crossed a line by altering Barkan’s words from a portion of the conversation about policing reform. Barkan, who has ALS, speaks with an assistive eye-tracking device.
“These are not my words. I have lost my ability to speak, but not my agency or my thoughts,” Barkan tweeted in response, adding “…You owe the entire disability community an apology.”
In the video excerpt, taken from a longer conversation about policing and social services, Barkan appears to say “Do we agree that we can redirect some of the funding for police?” In reality, Barkan interrupted Biden during the conversation to ask “Do we agree that we can redirect some of the funding?”
In the video, Barkan’s altered sentence is
followed by a dramatic black background stamped with the words “No police. Mob
rule. Total chaos. Coming to a town near you?” Those ominous warnings are
followed by a logo for Scalise’s reelection campaign.
The addition of the two words, falsely
rendered in Barkan’s voice, don’t significantly change the meaning of his
question, but the edit still crossed a line. A Twitter spokesperson confirmed
that the tweet violated the company’s policy for “synthetic and manipulated
media,” though did not specify which part of the video broke the rules.
The synthetic and manipulated media policy
states that Twitter “may label Tweets containing synthetic and manipulated
media to help people understand their authenticity and to provide additional
context.” In the policy, Twitter explains specifically that “new video frames,
overdubbed audio” and other edits count as deceptive and significant
manipulation.
Twitter is usually seen making things trendy
but this was an incident where twitter itself got in trend. It can affect the
entire bureaucracy of the country if words said by any activist are altered or
manipulated. However, Twitter’s AI-oriented algorithm soon came into the
picture and saved the audience from reading a manipulated tweet.
Was that a mistake?
Was that intentional?
Was that really crucial an issue?
Will these manipulations cease or keep-on
rendering people misguided?
All that we can do to find out answers to these questions is to go with the flow….
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