Misleading videos and false claims that President Joe Biden wandered off aimlessly from the G7 conference last week continued to go viral despite debunkings and fact-checks that tried to correct the record.
Google recommended false versions of the story as “top stories.” Deceptive video clips continued to accumulate millions of views on X. Copies of the videos were replayed on TikTok and YouTube with little context. Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, applied fact-checking labels to some posts but not to all.
The persistent nature of the misleading videos illustrates how major tech platforms and partisan media are playing off each other in the 2024 election cycle, keeping viral stories in people’s feeds after they’ve been proven to be misleading or even false.
In a familiar playbook, hyperpartisan outlets will continually push a piece of misleading information on their platforms and on social media, causing motivated followers who are primed to believe the outlets to amplify it further. That inundates tech platforms, which are unwilling or unable to correct the record quickly enough. The bad information then continues to outpace efforts to fact-check it.
The story revolved around Biden and other world leaders being greeted by a skydiving demonstration last Thursday at the Group of Seven meeting in Italy. Video shows Biden walking away from the leaders and toward a group of parachutists who had just landed, giving them two thumbs-up.
But conservative media outlets and the Republican National Committee posted videos shot from angles that cut out the parachutists. Some of their posts said incorrectly that Biden “wandered off.” Without the skydivers Biden was addressing included in those videos, viewers could be left with the impression that he was walking absentmindedly.
The misleading videos were an example of so-called cheap fakes, in which low-tech editing or other minor changes to videos, along with incorrect context, can amplify false but convincing messages.
The episode illustrated the dynamics of the new information ecosystem, in which tech platforms are hesitant to emphasize vetted, factual information during an election year for fear of appearing partisan — even as partisan operatives take advantage of the platforms’ attempts at neutrality.
Laura Edelson, an assistant professor of computer sciences at Northeastern University, said that the people behind the misleading claims are benefiting from tech companies’ cost-cutting. In the past two years, companies such as Google, Meta and X laid off large numbers of employees who worked on trust and safety teams, the core of the companies’ efforts to limit the spread of misinformation. “They eliminated the staffers who were enforcing those policies,” she said.
That puts the platforms in a relatively defenseless position against a partisan media outlet that decides to push a misleading claim, Edelson said. In this case, the conservative outlets were savvy about the topic, continuing to hammer the narrative that Biden is too old to be president.
“The reason this can be so successful is that it’s not trying to create a new narrative. It’s trying to reinforce a narrative that both people in the campaign and disinformation spreaders have been talking about for years,” she said. Biden is 81, and former President Donald Trump is 78.
Several independent fact-checkers debunked the video, including NBC News, PolitiFact, USA Today and The Washington Post.
The White House denounced the misleading videos as a “lie” spread by media outlets controlled by Rupert Murdoch’s conservative-leaning media organizations.
And British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who was standing near Biden, said afterward that Biden was being polite to the skydivers. “As far as I know he went over to talk to some of the parachute jumpers, saying thank you or hello to them all individually,” he told Britain’s Telegraph.
Still, days later, Google’s search engine recommended at least two misleading versions of the story as “top stories” after a search about Biden and the G7. One version was published by the New York Post, owned by Murdoch’s News Corp., and another by New Delhi Television, a news outlet based in India.
Google defended the company’s search results, telling NBC News in a statement. “For searches related to this news event, our systems across Search and YouTube surface the latest coverage from a diverse range of high-quality sources. Results will change depending on what content is available on a topic.”
Asked for a response to White House criticism, a spokesperson for the New York Post said the publication would speak through its editorials, including one Tuesday about how Biden’s age-related decline is obvious. New Delhi Television did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Users of Elon Musk’s social media app X tried to add context to some versions of the video with X’s “community notes” fact-checking feature after the videos first went viral last Thursday, but most of the misleading posts did not have fact-checks by Monday. One post from the conservative website TrendingPolitics had more than 25 million views as of Tuesday and no community note.
X did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The misleading videos also got millions of views collectively on TikTok, Facebook and YouTube, as well as thousands of engagements on Instagram. It is not clear how many of those views and engagements occurred after fact-checks were published.
All of those tech platforms have policies against misinformation. Google and YouTube ban manipulated content such as clips taken out of context. X bans “out-of-context media that may deceive or confuse people and lead to harm.” TikTok and Meta have established fact-checking programs designed to limit the spread of misinformation.
On TikTok, one video from the Daily Mail, a British tabloid, got more than 3.7 million views. Facebook provided more eyeballs, including more than 23,000 plays on a video from former Fox News host Glenn Beck. YouTube added more than 670,000 views on a video from Sky News Australia. And on Instagram, a video post from Fox News host Sean Hannity had more than 18,800 likes.
Instagram did apply its fact-checking process to some of the videos. It put a label on a post from Fox News host Jesse Watters, warning users: “Missing context. Independent fact-checkers say information in this post could mislead people,” with links to two debunkings. A similar label appears on an Instagram video from the New York Post.
Some debunkings did well on those platforms, too. A fact-checking video from NBC News had 5 million views on TikTok, and a similar Instagram post from NBC News had more than 15,500 likes on Instagram. But people who saw the misleading videos did not necessarily see the fact-checks.
A spokesperson for Fox News, which, like the New York Post and Sky News Australia, is owned by Murdoch’s companies, said its television programs “aired the unedited, wide shot footage of the president in Italy that was serviced directly from the White House pool.” Spokespeople for TikTok and Meta did not have immediate comment. The Daily Mail, Sky News Australia and Glenn Beck’s media company did not immediately respond.
Social media platforms remain a source of news for many Americans. On Facebook, 91% of U.S. users say they see at least some kind of news-related content, according to a survey in March from the Pew Research Center, and the numbers were similar for other apps.
That’s despite concerns about accuracy. A Pew survey from last year found that, among adults who get news on social media, 40% said inaccuracy was the part they dislike the most about it, up from 31% five years earlier.