Trump spreads fake video of Joe Biden
Donald Trump has been criticised for retweeting a doctored video of Joe Biden supposedly endorsing his re-election – spurring Twitter to use its “manipulated media” warning tag for a video for the first time.
In the clip, originally shared by White House social media director Dan Scavino, Mr Biden first stumbles over his words and then says “we can only re-elect Donald Trump”.
However, in the full clip, the context of Mr Biden’s remarks is clear. Exhorting his audience to ignore attacks from Bernie Sanders and get behind him, he says: “We can only re-elect Donald Trump if in fact we get engaged in this circular firing squad here.”
The selectively edited version of the video has been viewed nearly six million times. After Mr Scavino and Mr Trump shared it, its selectively edited nature drew harsh criticism.
“Disinfo from the Trump campaign. This flagrantly and dishonestly cuts Biden off,” wrote Politico‘s Bill Scher. The Tablet‘s Yair Rosenberg tracked how Mr Trump and his campaign spread the video – and how even a pro-Bernie Sanders account distributed it too.
After his disastrous first TV debate, failed Democratic candidate Michael Bloomberg put out a clip implying he had stumped his rivals by asking if any of them had started a business.
In fact, they barely paused before continuing to attack him.
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