U.S. President Joe Biden participates in a working session with world leaders during a G7 summit at Borgo Egnazia, Italy, on June 13.Andrew Medichini/The Associated Press
Joe Biden is losing his mind.
Surely, you saw the video of him at the recent G7 meetings in Apulia, Italy, that received global attention. While watching a skydiving demonstration with his fellow world leaders, Mr. Biden wandered off from the group, aimlessly, prompting host Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni to walk over to the U.S. President and gently guide him back to his peers.
The New York Post blasted a story of the incident on its front page headlined: “MEANDER IN CHIEF.”
It was sad.
And it was fake.
I’ll admit I fell for the video when I first came across it on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter. Only later did I discover that the video had been manipulated; it had been cropped to appear as though Mr. Biden was giving a thumbs-up to an empty space. What wasn’t shown were the several parachutists who had just landed that Mr. Biden was congratulating. Ms. Meloni was harmlessly urging the President to return to a briefing about to begin regarding the skydiving demonstration the G7 leaders had just witnessed.
This wouldn’t be such a big deal if it was an isolated incident of disinformation being propagated by bad actors in the cause of getting Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump elected. It is not. Rather, it is just another example of a litany of manipulated (dubbed “cheap fake”) videos that are gaining traction on the internet and could have an outsized impact on the coming U.S. election in which the age of the 81-year-old U.S. President – and the state of his mental acuity – have become an issue.
There were similarly misleading videos spread online of Mr. Biden at the 80th-anniversary D-Day celebrations at Normandy which made him look, well, out of it. One, for instance, dubbed “The Invisible Chair” made it appear that the President was unable to sit down in a chair, seemingly paralyzed in a crouch position. Another showed him supposedly sleeping while ceremonies went on. They were both fake. For unsuspecting viewers, however, they could be quite impactful, especially if they already had questions about Mr. Biden’s suitability for four more years in office.
This is not to say there aren’t legitimate questions to be raised about someone who would be 86 years old if he finished his second term as president. It did not help that Special Counsel Robert Hur’s February report into the President’s handling of classified documents cast Mr. Biden in an unflattering light.
After interviewing the President, Mr. Hur concluded Mr. Biden would present himself to a jury as a “sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.” Mr. Hur said that in his interviews with the President, Mr. Biden could not recall when his son Beau had died or when he had served as vice-president.
It’s not at all surprising that someone who will turn 82 later this year would have a memory that is poor or has significant limitations. But that is not the issue here.
The issue comes down to Republicans, or agents of the far right in the U.S., exploiting questions about Mr. Biden’s mental capacity by creating videos that are misleading or outright lies. And there is nothing that anyone can seemingly do about it. Or at least wants to do about it.
The amount of disinformation being spread on X since Elon Musk bought the company in 2022 has shot up to disturbing levels. One of the first things Mr. Musk did when he took over the company was to get rid of staff whose job it was to try and contain disinformation and falsehoods being spread on the site. Now those folks are gone and it’s a misinformation free-for-all. Before Mr. Musk took over, we seemed on the precipice of a disinformation explosion (helped along by the advent of artificial intelligence technology), but now we are seeing it play out in real-time. This is the dystopian future predicted in sci-fi movies. And if it is becoming a force in U.S. politics, we can expect it to soon become a factor in our politics as well – if it hasn’t already.
X isn’t the only platform where disinformation is being spread. Another is Facebook and its cousin Instagram, both run by Meta. Last year, Meta announced it would review its policies around “deep fake” videos after someone posted one suggesting Mr. Biden was a pedophile. Another altered video purporting to show former House speaker Nancy Pelosi drunk was also not taken down by Meta when it was posted on Facebook and drawn to the attention of the company.
This is the world in which we live today. Fake videos. Fake audio. Fake photos. And millions of unsuspecting people being duped into believing these posts are real.
This is how democracies fall and despots take power.