An editor from the conspiracy site Infowars has provided us with a dizzying example of video manipulation that's created a "choose your own reality" crisis.

A viral clip showing a confrontation between CNN reporter Jim Acosta and a White House aide at a Wednesday press conference with President Trump has provided us with a handy example of the coming video manipulation dystopia. The video, tweeted by Paul Joseph Watson, an editor of the conspiracy site Infowars, purports to show that Acosta touched the aide as she tried to take a microphone away from Acosta.

@AlliemalCNN @Acosta "He never once touched her." That is a complete lie. He clearly did. Is whatever you're paid by CNN really worth making a total fool out of yourself for the world to see? https://t.co/vgDynDQWJf

The video clip was picked up and tweeted by White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders as proof that Acosta "put his hands on a young woman just trying to do her job." But observers online quickly pointed out that the clip may have been doctored and that Watson might have changed the speed of Acosta's arm to "amp up the conflict." There's no evidence that the video was deliberately sped up — but the change in format, from a high-quality video to a low-quality GIF, turns the question of whether it was "doctored" into a semantic debate.

This video analysis by BuzzFeed News demonstrates what the GIF conversion process does to video. While it's not technically "sped up" by intent, it effectively is in practice. The video-to-GIF conversion removes frames from the source material by reducing the frame rate. The GIF-making tool GIF Brewery, for example, typically reduces source video to 10 frames per second. Raw, televised video typically has a frame rate of 29.97 frames per second.



BuzzFeed News / Hoss Ghertassi / Via CSPAN

When frames drop out, the video appears jumpier. Acosta's arm seems to move faster. Everything accelerates.

And then here come the tweets.

This subtle edit of the Acosta video - his arm sped up ever so slightly, to amp up the conflict - now has thousands of retweets and hundreds of thousands of views. Video, once the end-all central validator, is becoming as vulnerable to politicized distortion as everything else https://t.co/rsYkn6u8pz

Some video-savvy observers suggested that the clips are altered — specifically, that the downward motion of Acosta's arm had been sped up. The debunks went viral. 1) Took @PressSec Sarah Sanders' video of briefing 2) Tinted red and made transparent over CSPAN video 3) Red motion is when they doctored video speed 4) Sped up to make Jim Acosta's motion look like a chop 5) I've edited video for 15+ years 6) The White House doctored it https://t.co/q6arkYSx0V

The intern's reach for the mic is slowed down, and the "chop" motion is accelerated. Here's an annotated side by side comparison: https://t.co/wLCG5GVdo1

CNN executives decried the video as "actual fake news," and expressed outrage at a White House official sharing a clip originally tweeted by an Infowars editor. Absolutely shameful, @PressSec. You released a doctored video - actual fake news. History will not be kind to you. https://t.co/v1w9Lj9TlK

Watson, however, categorically denies doctoring the video. He told BuzzFeed News that the video was "not edited - it's just zoomed in." He also explained that he took the original footage directly from a GIF posted to the Twitter account of the website the Daily Wire.

"Fact is, Daily Wire put up a gif, I download a gif, zoomed in saved it again as an mt2 file - then converted it to an mp4," Watson said over direct message. "Digitally it's gonna look a tiny bit different after processing and zooming in, but I did not in any way deliberately 'speed up' or 'distort' the video. That's just horse shit." Watson, and Infowars, it should be clear, have been reckless before. Just today, Watson deleted a tweet alleging that the man who perpetrated this morning's mass shooting in California was "Middle Eastern" (reports suggest he was white). So, who's telling the truth?

On Twitter, Luke Bailey put the two videos side by side. The videos look mostly the same, though it's unclear if there is some subtle change to the speed. Bailey noted that differences in the video could be due to "working across framerates and compressions." OK, I have been looking at this all morning - here's C-Span vs. the InfoWars clip from @PrisonPlanet that the White House tweeted. Any changes, if they did make them, would be incredibly minor - and possibly due to working across framerates and compressions https://t.co/4FasYDZv4a

Watson's defense is an issue of semantics — that he altered the video but did not "doctor" it to show something that wasn't there. Unfortunately, establishing just how the video was changed is complicated. The original video file was created by Watson from a GIF file that the Daily Wire tweeted. It's not out of the realm of possibility that the image was distorted by that process. More importantly, as previously noted, the process of converting videos to GIFs often results in frame loss from the original video file. (In the case of the Daily Wire GIF, that means there are likely frames missing from the original CSPAN video it was made from.)

“You don't need to create the fake video for this tech to have a serious impact. You just point to the fact that the tech exists and you can impugn the integrity of the stuff that’s real.”