Distorted video of Nancy Pelosi making her sound drunk doing the rounds on social media
A doctored video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is doing the rounds on social media in an attempt to show her slurring her words after meeting with President Donald Trump on Wednesday, May 22. The clip had now been removed by YouTube. Although the video has been removed from the site, there are other copies of it still circulating on Twitter and Facebook, according to reports.
The manipulated video, which has been viewed millions of times on social media, comes amid warnings from the US intelligence community that more sophisticated form of doctoring may be part of future disinformation campaigns targeting the electorate in the United States.
The doctored video shows Pelosi making comments at the Center for American Progress on Wednesday, however, her words appear slurred in the clip. Reports state that there are similar manipulated clips targeting Pelosi circulating on social media.
Pelosi's spokesperson, Drew Hamill, while talking to The Washington Post, said: "We're not going to comment on this sexist trash."
A professor at UC Berkeley and an expert in digital forensics and image analysis, Hany Farid, said: "By my calculation, the altered video has been slowed by almost 75% introducing a significant distortion in her speech," CNN reported.
A representative from Facebook told the outlet that the Pelosi video had been referred to the firm's third-party fact checkers for review, however, none of them have rated the video yet. If the third-party fact checkers deduce that the video is misleading, Facebook would then significantly reduce the distribution of the vide on its site. One version of the doctored video had been viewed nearly 2.5 million times on Facebook by Friday, May 24, morning.
Meanwhile, Google-owned YouTube removed the video stating: "YouTube has clear policies that outline what content is not acceptable to post and we remove videos violating these policies when flagged to us. These videos violated our policies and have been removed."
Fox Business' at 7 pm ET, on Thursday, May 23, night, had reportedly featured a segment where panelists raised questions about Pelosi's health and competence based on an edited version of her speech. The clip was subsequently tweeted by President Trump.
Trump's attorney Rudy Giuliani also tweeted, and then deleted, a similar video, raising the same questions about the House Speaker's fitness based on the edited clip. US Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, in January, had warned Congress of a new artificial intelligence-based technology called deep fakes that makes it possible to realistically manipulate videos.