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White House says Biden videos are ’deepfakes’ in attempt to censor them

Heritage Foundation analysts claim that the federal administration intends to put pressure on social networks to ban images that make the president look bad.

Joe Biden

(Saul Loeb/AFP)

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The White House lashed out at social networks and the Republican National Committee this week when it claimed that the videos of Joe Biden in strange and embarrassing situations are "deepfakes" and manipulations. The words of Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre suggest that they are all attempts to make the president look bad and that he is in perfect condition to perform his duties.

This new twist in the White House narrative joins that of several media outlets, who claim to have verified the content posted on social media and that the videos in which Biden is seen disoriented and confused are fake or taken out of context.

The Washington Post published a series of articles earlier this week to discredit the extensive collection of images showing the president in moments of difficulty when it came to walking on stage at public events.

Falls, moments of confusion and extended stares into the void. These compilations of images have been flooding social media for months. The latest correspond to Joe Biden's appearances during the G7 summit, his official visit to France for the commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the Normandy landings, and a fundraising campaign with Barack Obama. They also contradict several reports published by The Wall Street Journal that claim the president has lapses privately with his advisors and staff.

Censorship on social media

According to several conservative analysts, the new narrative that the left and the White House intend to impose is new censorship on social media content. A week before the first presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, the use of this terminology to refer to content that shows Biden as a weak president serves to put pressure on social media platforms.

"It's very clear what's going on here," Jake Denton, an analyst at the Heritage Foundation, told Fox News. “They're trying to push a new term underneath the school of misinformation to try and pressure social media companies to take action on videos of this nature.”

According to Fenton, the censorship that the White House intends to institute "requires a ramp-up stage where you allege that something is a ‘cheap fake,’ or that it's malicious in some way related to misinformation, and then you have essentially the evidence, the fact pattern, whatever, to go and push the social media companies with takedown requests, because it's misinformation regarding an election. So to me, that's kind of the seed that's being planted here."

Institutional gaslighting

In the words of Daily Signal conservative columnist Jarrett Stepman, with all of this, the White House and its like-minded media are "gaslighting." This is an abusive type of manipulation in which someone is made to question their own reality.

"All those videos you’ve seen of him staring into space, moving awkwardly, falling, garbling words, shaking hands with the air, forgetting names, describing recent conversations with people who’ve been dead for years, and being led around by handlers like a child? Just fake news," the Heritage Foundation-affiliated columnist noted in a sarcastic tone.

This has been a combined effort between the administration and the progressive media to make the public believe that everything they have seen in videos is totally fake and that the president is perfectly capable of carrying out a second presidential term.

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