Joe Biden proclaiming that Americans will not be “safe” under his presidency. The Democratic White House candidate “asleep” during a TV interview. The septuagenarian, “hidden”, alone, in his basement.
These three videos have been posted in recent days on the social networks of the US president or his team, as Donald Trump tries to bridge the gap between him in the polls of his rival for the November 3 presidential election.
And each has been declared “fake” or “manipulated” by major social networks or “fact-checkers”.
The France 24 television channel has also just requested the immediate withdrawal of images from one of its reports, inserted without its knowledge in a campaign spot of the American president. The news channel is “all the more indignant as its images have been raised and diverted from their meaning,” responded Christine Saragosse, CEO of France Médias Monde.
If the advertising spots have long punctuated American election campaigns, the non-concealed use of manipulated images worries the tech giants.
Twitter has cracked down by deleting or flagging several tweets from the US president. And Facebook, citing the risk of social unrest, for its part announced Thursday that it would not allow the publication of new campaign spots during the week before the poll.
Doubt remains over the impact these messages, almost impossible to curb once they go viral, have on voters. But a new threshold has undoubtedly been crossed.
“There is a long tradition of politicians who hijack the words or principles of their opponents. It’s part of politics, ”Ethan Porter, professor at George Washington University, told AFP.
“But the Trump team is in part waging a campaign that is completely detached from reality, which has little, if any, precedent in American political history,” he adds.
Joe Biden’s campaign team has not, so far, received this same type of criticism.
“The Trump team has mainly used manipulated images to try to get more, say, more ‘palpable’ evidence of the accusations they are making, because there is no real evidence,” said Shannon McGregor, professor at the Hussman School of Journalism, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Despite repeated attacks on the former Democratic vice president at the Republican convention, the established national polling average barely changed, giving Joe Biden a seven-point lead.
But the advantage of the Democrat in key states, which will determine the elections by switching to one candidate or the other, is smaller, sometimes within the margin of error.
“In the pocket” of Biden
Donald Trump’s campaign team accuses major social networks of double standards.
“Joe Biden has the tech giants in his pocket and, when it comes to defining what a manipulated image is, the progressive Silicon Valley elite are blatantly taking sides,” AFP Samantha Zager, deputy spokesperson for the Trump team.
Rather than attempting to broaden the voter base, “this speech is really divisive and rather targets the base of Trump supporters to try to convince them to vote”, analyzes Shannon McGregor.
And for Ethan Porter, the team of the Republican president is convinced that his approach is winning: “they believe that in 2016, their use of social networks and their strategy allowed them to win the election.”
“I don’t mean to say he won’t win” again, says the professor. “But that if he wins, I cannot conceive” that their manipulated videos and messages will be “one of the main causes” of his victory, he explains, claiming that the “fact check” (verification of facts) of false information has a real impact.
Cyrus Krohn, who was in charge of the 2008 Republican Party’s digital campaign, points out that the race this year “seems to be tightening”.
And “you can attribute it to the ‘fear factor’ created on the internet.”
This means, he says, that the manipulated images are indeed working for the Trump team.
But although the Biden team does not do it “so openly”, he says, “there are groups on the left … deploying the same tactics as the official Trump campaign team.”