Twitter puts ‘manipulated’ label on Trump’s retweet of clipped Biden video

Chennai: A video posted on Saturday by White House Social Media Director Dan Scavino, and retweeted by President Donald Trump has been tagged as ‘manipulated’ by Twitter, in the first instance since the micro-blogging platform introduced measures to curb fake news.

The video showed a clipped portion of Democratic Presidential Candidate Joe Biden’s recent speech in Kansas City Missouri, to make it seem like he said, “We can only re-elect Trump.”

In reality, Biden’s full sentence was, “We can only reelect Donald Trump if in fact we get engaged in this circular firing squad here. It’s gotta be a positive campaign, so join us.”

Twitter had introduced labels on March 5 for tweets with manipulated content or manually edited as well as deepfake videos created using AI tools.

But the tag on Scavino’s video post was visible only on users’ timelines and not when one clicked into the tweet or searched for it. Reuters reported that a Twitter spokesperson said the glitch was being fixed.

Scavino continued to insist that the video was not manipulated, and continued to grab millions of views on Twitter. And, unreferreed, the video was shared millions of times on Facebook too, which is facing criticism for refusing to censor political ads that spread utter lies.