A Fake Biden Video Got Over a Million Views Before Twitter Did Anything About It

Is this really the best Twitter can do?

With just 24 hours to go before polls open on Election Day, basic and easily debunked disinformation is being shared by high profile social media accounts, and the platforms that have had four years to put measures in place to stop this stuff are failing to stop it.

Over the weekend, a Twitter user called Leni posted a video on Saturday afternoon that appeared to show Democratic nominee Joe Biden addressing a rally in Tampa, Florida by saying: “Hello, Minnesota.”

A quick fact check would have found the video had been manipulated, as the original video of Biden’s Minnesota rally was easily accessible online.

Twitter didn’t fact-check Leni’s video and didn’t place a “manipulated media” label on it, and over the course of Sunday it picked up momentum among right-wing communities online. Newsmax host and right-wing pundit John Cardillo shared the video with his 278,000 followers.

Even though Parker Butler, a Biden campaign staffer, pointed out the video was fake, Twitter allowed it to circulate throughout Sunday without labeling it “manipulated media,” as their election policies state it should have.

The video was also reported as true by the conservative blog RedState, and a RedState author shared a screenshot of the tweet to their Facebook page.

Only on Sunday night, by which time the video had been seen over 1.1 million times, did Twitter finally label it manipulated media, after which the original poster deleted the tweet.

But, there are still multiple versions of the video being shared on Twitter on Monday morning, each with hundreds of views.

The video is just piece of disinformation being shared by pro-Trump individuals hours before Election Day.

On Sunday evening, Richard Grenell, a close ally of Trump who has served in multiple roles in the administration, including ambassador to Germany and acting Director of National Intelligence, tweeted that Biden was a “Washington, DC phony” above a picture showing the former vice president in a plane without a mask.

Again, a quick fact-check here would have shown that the picture of Biden inside the plane was taken in 2019, before the pandemic. 

The photo came from a Vogue magazine article titled, “On the Campaign Trail with Remi Yamamoto, Joe Biden's Traveling National Press Secretary.” It was published last Friday, but the caption on the photo clearly states it was taken in November 2019.

Despite Yamamoto herself replying to the tweet and pointing out the photo was taken last year, Twitter hasn’t labeled or deleted the tweet. It has so far been liked over 33,000 times and shared more than 16,000 times. Conservative talk-show host Mark Levin also shared Grenell’s tweet, boosting it even further. 

Twitter told VICE News that the tweet did not breach its rules.

As the election nears, the volume of misinformation on Twitter and Facebook is almost incalculable and it would be unfair to expect these companies to remove all of it immediately. 

But in both the cases cited above, Twitter should be able to do better.

With the video, Twitter’s internal systems should have been able to quickly see that the video was gaining traction through Sunday, particularly when blue-checked verified accounts began sharing it. They should also be able to automatically prevent other accounts from re-uploading the same video — such technology is deployed very successfully in combating child abuse material and copyright infringements.

But Twitter didn’t do that, and the video was only finally labeled “manipulated” when journalists began pointing out the issue to Twitter. That should not be the job of journalists.

And this isn’t the first time this has happened. In August, Trump’s social media director Dan Scavino shared a video that claimed to show Biden falling asleep during a TV interview. It was completely fake. Then in September, the Trump campaign posted a video making it seem like Biden had forgotten the Pledge of Allegiance. Again, fake.

In the second case, Grenell is an influential and high-profile member of Trump’s inner circle and as such, his tweets need to be held to a higher standard, particularly when multiple accounts reported and flagged the issue.

With hours to go before Election Day, it is hard to say what impact such disinformation will have on the outcome of the vote, but after four years, Twitter should be much, much better at this.

Here’s what else is happening in the world of election disinformation:

Last week there were some rumblings in QAnon-world when their Dear Leader didn’t post any new updates — or Q drops, as they are known — for almost a week. But Q returned this weekend to fire up followers ahead of the election.

“Are you ready to finish what we started? ‘Nothing can stop what is coming’ is not just a catch-phrase,” Q said on Saturday.

Many followers responded in a typically hyperbolic fashion. “Buckle up! Showtime is here!” said one, “drop the hammer and start the show. We are ready,” said another.

But it seems that some followers’ are tired of getting their hopes raised for the 1,000th time before being left down again.

“We have heard it’s go time for a long time. Kinda like the boy who cried wolf,” one follower responded. But it was another QAnon fan who perfectly summed not just the latest Q drop, but really the entire movement: “I am excited, but I’m not sure what I am excited about.” 

The chaos, partisan propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation that have characterized the final weeks of the 2020 election campaigns, will not simply disappear overnight, and now U.S. officials are warning that the Kremlin is primed to take advantage of the fallout from Tuesday’s vote — whatever the outcome.

The Kremlin will play a waiting game, officials told Bloomberg, likely deciding on  what tactics to deploy depending on the outcome of the election. One possible tactic could be the use of distributed denial of service attacks to overwhelm local and state election websites to sow distrust in the voting process.

While a landslide victory for Biden would prove a difficult result for Russian trolls to deal with, a much closer result will be fertile ground for their disinformation efforts.

“If it is close, expect a lot of noise about voter fraud and miscounting. This will happen in any case, but the Russians will amplify it,” said James Lewis, director of the strategic technologies program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.