(Washington) The Republican camp is flooding the internet with videos taken out of context to depict Joe Biden, the 81-year-old Democratic president, as someone who no longer has all his faculties less than five months before the US presidential election in November.
The White House protested against these truncated and manipulated videos at a time when many voters are asking questions about the state of physical and mental health of the head of state. His rival Donald Trump, himself 78 years old, has made the captain’s age a major axis of attack in his campaign.
The videos, which purport to show a disoriented Biden watching a skydiving show or frozen during a concert, illustrate how personal and hateful the campaign has become since Donald Trump’s criminal conviction and ahead of the first presidential debate between the two candidates.
The videos, published on .
In a clip shared by the “RNC Research” account, the American president makes the gesture of sitting down during a ceremony commemorating the Landings of the Second World War.
Conservative influencers jumped on the 13-second video, falsely accusing the president of trying to pose when there were no chairs.
But if we continue to watch the footage, it is clear that there was indeed a seat behind him.
Jake Schneider, RNC account manager, assured AFP that he was content to publish clips that “come straight from the pool video feeds”.
The video in question was posted with the label “Embarrassing.”
An AFP fact check found it was edited to remove the following footage, which showed the president starting to sit down, stopping while waiting for Defense Minister Lloyd Austin, then sat down for good when the latter stood up to speak.
Zeve Sanderson, director of the Center for Social Media and Politics at New York University, says truncated videos are effective because they are less obviously manipulated than completely invented or AI-generated content. .
People may be more tempted to take these videos deprived of context at face value because there are “real clips of Joe Biden being old,” he says.
“They are consistent with the general feeling that already exists in public opinion. If people thought Joe Biden was young and lively, it would be unlikely that these clips would spread as much,” he told AFP. “It’s an extremely effective tactic. »
In another widely shared video, Joe Biden appears disoriented as he walks away from other leaders during a skydiving demonstration at the G7 Summit in Italy.
After the Republican Party published the images, the New York Post shared the video online, cropped to exclude the paratrooper that Joe Biden had gone to congratulate.
The White House also spoke out against much-discussed footage published by the RNC account and the newspaper, which shows the president “frozen” during a concert.
“It’s telling that right-wing critics, including (conservative mogul) Rupert Murdoch’s sad little political action committee, the New York Post, resort to disinformation and cheap fakes,” laments Andrew Bates , deputy press secretary of the White House, in a press release to AFP.
According to him, the outgoing president’s record “is so threatening in their eyes that they feel the need to invent things.”
Steven Cheung, Donald Trump’s campaign manager, retorts that the opposing team’s comments are “ridiculous” in the face of “harsh reality.”
Polls show that many more Americans believe that the current president is too old for a second term than those who think the same thing about Donald Trump.
For this reason, Zeve Sanderson expects disinformation campaigns targeting Joe Biden’s faculties to intensify.
“We’re going to continue to have content relating to Biden’s age, because it continues to concern voters.”
