Twitter Flags Video Retweeted by Trump as ‘Manipulated Media’

Twitter’s new feature or label, known as “manipulated media”, was applied on Sunday. This happened to be the first time this feature will be applied and it was applied on a misleading and illusory edited video of former vice president Joe Biden. The video was shared by White House social media director and Trump’s longest-serving aide Dan Scavino and retweeted by President Donald Trump.

Twitter has earlier announced the criteria to judge any post that falls under this policy.

Twitter said: “In order for content to be labeled or removed under this policy, we must have reason to believe that media, or the context in which media are presented, are significantly and deceptively altered or manipulated. Synthetic and manipulated media take many different forms and people can employ a wide range of technologies to produce these media. In assessing whether media have been significantly and deceptively altered or fabricated, some of the factors we consider include:

• whether the content has been substantially edited in a manner that fundamentally alters its composition, sequence, timing, or framing; 
• any visual or auditory information (such as new video frames, overdubbed audio, or modified subtitles) that has been added or removed; and
• whether media depicting a real person have been fabricated or simulated

The said video who has been outpoured to the presence of Democratic race to drive out President Trump in November. This was based on the speech Joe Biden gave in Kansas City on Saturday.

After the speech, Scavino shared the video on Twitter portraying it to people as if Biden was endorsing Trump.

At the beginning of the edited version of the video, Biden was shown stammering and stumbling on a line and later said, “Excuse me. We can only reelect Donald Trump.”

A report said: the other part of the video has been deleted where the former vice president said: “Excuse me. We can only reelect Donald Trump if in fact we get engaged in this circular firing squad here. It’s gotta be a positive campaign.”

Exactly at 5 pm on Sunday, Twitter applied the label on this video. It was recorded that the video had 5 million views and more than 21,000 retweets within 18 hours of it been posted.

Actually, when people searched for the video before it was removed by Twitter, the label ‘manipulated media’ wasn’t showing up. Katie Rosborough who is the twitter spokeswoman said it was appearing in individuals’ timelines. “The company is working on a fix” she added.

However, Twitter’s new policy prohibits sharing manipulated media that could cause harm. The company may apply labels to tweets to help people understand their authenticity or to provide additional context.