Facebook is refusing to remove another doctored video altered to make House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appear as though she is drunk and slurring her words. A similar video appeared online and was shared by Donald Trump in May 2019.
The clip appears with the caption, “This is unbelievable, she is blowed out of her mind, I bet this gets took down!”
Facebook instead put a warning over the video, writing, “The information in this post is a mix of true and false statements or it could simply be incomplete. In some cases, the information is misleading.”
Facebook’s fact-check partner noted, “Partly false: The tempo of the video was slowed and sections edited out to make it appear Pelosi was drunk.”
Though the clip has been viewed more than 2 million times, Facebook says it won’t remove it, according to CNN, which got this statement from Andy Stone, a spokesman for the social platform: “Following an incident over a year ago with a previous video of Speaker Pelosi, we took a number of key steps, making it very clear to people on Facebook when a third-party fact-checker determines content to be false and updating our policy to make explicit the kind of manipulated media we will remove. And, as always, when a video is determined false, its distribution is dramatically reduced and people who see it, try to share it, or have already shared it, see warnings alerting them that it’s false.”
The source of the Facebook clip was a video that had been circulating on TikTok. TikTok had removed the clip for violating its “synthetic media policy.” When CNN pointed out to YouTube that it, too, was hosting copies of the video, YouTube promptly removed it.
The clip comes from Pelosi’s May 20, 2020 press conference. Here’s the original starting at 19:47.
