The altered videos of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that appear to show her slurring her words likely will continue to spread on the internet after the president retweeted the Fox News version, and Facebook says it won’t be taking the videos down.
YouTube said Friday that it has removed the videos that have spread in the past couple of days after Pelosi, D-San Francisco, during a Wednesday speech in Washington accused President Donald Trump of a “coverup” amid his refusal to cooperate with congressional investigations. Video of her speech was then slowed down and edited, according to experts quoted by several news outlets — although since her speech was shown live on television, it was easy to tell that some videos afterward were manipulated.
The videos don’t violate Facebook’s terms of service, with a spokeswoman saying the company doesn’t have a policy that says posts on the platform must be true. But the videos have been flagged as false by at least one of Facebook’s fact-checking partners, so the company is reducing the videos’ ranking in users’ feeds.
The tech giants’ handling of the videos is raising broader concerns about what will happen when similar videos — perhaps “deepfakes” that are more sophisticated, whose veracity will be tougher to determine — become more common, especially ahead of the U.S. presidential elections next year.
Credo Action, an advocacy group known for its online petitions, slammed Facebook’s response.
“This is a stunning abdication of responsibility from a company with a well-earned reputation for facilitating the spread of malicious right-wing conspiracy theories,” Josh Nelson, co-director of the group, said Friday. “This week, conservatives released altered videos of Speaker Nancy Pelosi as a trial run to see what they’ll be able to get away with in 2020.”
A group called Politics Watchdog, which has more than 30,000 followers on its Facebook page, reportedly was the first to post an altered video. That post had been shared more than 47,000 times as of Friday.
“The Facebook response, or lack of it, to the doctored video of Nancy Pelosi is disappointing since the doctored video is clearly a distortion, and therefore a lie,” said Larry Gerston, professor emeritus for San Jose State University’s political science department.
“Playing down the visibility of a doctored video (one with significant political implications) in the News Feed is not going to address the spread of the video in other powerful ways — for example via Facebook groups,” said Irina Raicu, director of the Internet Ethics Program at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. “So Facebook will still allow its platform to be used to amplify, worldwide, what is clearly misinformation.”
But others point out there’s a place for political commentary online.
“I’m torn,” said Eric Goldman, director of the Santa Clara University School of Law’s High Tech Law Institute. “On the one hand, it’s fake news and it should go. On the other hand, it could be political commentary and it should stay.”
Goldman added that the tech companies’ disparate responses may be good for the public. YouTube determined that the videos violated its terms of service, but Facebook did not. Twitter, which a couple of years ago took down a couple of retweets by Trump but has repeatedly said the president’s tweets are newsworthy, would not comment Friday.
“YouTube and Facebook can disagree and they can create different communities and environments,” he said. “I think ultimately that’s a healthy dynamic.”
But Gerston thinks that a lack of regulations and guidance about this “Wild West stage” of social media is unfortunate.
“Unfortunately, for the time being, users and voters will be left with the task of deciding what is or is not accurate,” he said.
