Seeing Isn’t Believing The Fact Checker’s guide to manipulated video The Internet is increasingly populated with false and misleading videos. These videos — spread by politicians, advocacy groups and everyday users — are viewed by millions. The Fact Checker set out to develop a universal language to label manipulated video and hold creators and sharers of this misinformation accountable. We have found three main ways video is being altered: footage taken out of context, deceptively edited or deliberately altered. These categories are further broken down into subcategories, which are shown below. Misrepresentation Missing Context Isolation Omission Deceptive Editing Splicing Doctoring Malicious Transformation Fabrication Deceptive Editing Malicious Transformation Missing Context Misrepresentation Isolation Omission Splicing Doctoring Fabrication Missing Context Deceptive Editing Malicious Transformation Misrepresentation Isolation Omission Splicing Doctoring Fabrication This guide is intended to help all of us navigate this new information landscape and start a necessary conversation. The videos in this presentation play without sound. Warning: This graphic requires JavaScript. Please enable JavaScript for the best experience.

Missing Context The video’s framing lacks or misstates the context in which events occurred. Misrepresentation Presenting unaltered video in an inaccurate manner misrepresents the footage and misleads the viewer. Using incorrect dates or locations are examples of subverting context. President Trump and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R- Fla.) claimed a video showed men giving money to women and children in Honduras to cross the U.S. border ahead of the 2018 midterm elections; Gaetz suggested that the money came from U.S. organizations and George Soros. However, the video was shot in Guatemala, not Honduras, and it was unclear why the men were handing out money to women and children. Read related article Senior Trump campaign adviser Katrina Pierson tweeted a video on May 5 she said represented rockets fired from Gaza into Israel. But the video was filmed around or before 2014 in Belarus, 2,000 miles away. Read related article White House social media director Dan Scavino shared this video on Twitter as flooding from Hurricane Irma at Miami International Airport in September 2017. The airport responded within minutes, saying the footage was not of Miami. The original footage appears to have been filmed in Mexico City a few weeks earlier. Scavino later acknowledged his mistake and deleted the tweet. Read related article Isolation Sharing a brief clip from a longer video creates a false narrative that does not reflect the event as it occurred. Point-of-view videos also belong in this category when they promote only one angle of a story. Videos posted to social media incorrectly represented a moment during the Nationals’ visit to the White House on Nov. 4, 2019. The clipped video made it look like Nationals pitcher Stephen Strasburg refused to shake President Trump’s hand. The full video shows he returned to shake the president’s hand after hugging his teammates. Read related article The American Action Network launched a digital and television ad campaign with an isolated clip of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) on Nov. 18, 2019. The moment is from a longer interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Nov. 13, 2019 after the first day of public impeachment inquiry hearings. From the full context of the interview, it’s clear she is not referring to Trump’s reelection, as the ad suggests. Instead, it seems she is arguing that the inquiry needs to move quickly to prevent foreign interference in the upcoming 2020 election. Read related article In 2012, then-presidential candidate Mitt Romney was talking about ways to increase the financial stability of Social Security when his speech was interrupted by hecklers who yelled “corporations.” He responded with “corporations are people." Romney was criticized for not thinking of “people as people”; however, his quote was isolated and repeated without the larger context of the situation. Read related article During her speech at a Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) banquet, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) said: “CAIR was founded after 9/11, because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.” This clip was shared on social media and her remarks spawned controversy — but it was taken out of context. Read related article On Twitter, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) shared a clip of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings, claiming he uttered a “dogwhistle for going after birth control.” The video snippet from his testimony did not make clear that Kavanaugh was quoting from the plaintiffs’ position in an contraceptive case, rather than offering his own opinion. A day later Harris replied to her tweet with a video of Kavanaugh’s full statement. Read related article

Deceptive editing The video has been edited and rearranged. Omission Editing out large portions from a video and presenting it as a complete narrative, despite missing key elements, is a technique used to skew reality. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservatives party published a manipulated video clip on Nov. 5, 2019 of Labour’s Brexit spokesman Keir Starmer. The video omitted a key answer from an ITV interview, giving the misleading impression that Starmer had no answer for Brexit. Read related article Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) tweeted a deceptively edited video of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) in a February 2018 Al Jazeera interview. The edited video removes a key part of Omar’s comment and makes it seem like Omar is saying that Americans ‘should be more fearful of white men.’ She was responding to a question about Americans' fear of Jihadism and referencing an Anti-Defamation League report, which said that between 2009 and 2018, there were 100 deaths involving Islamist extremists. By contrast, right-wing extremists were responsible for almost three-quarters of the 427 deaths attributed to extremists. Read related article An edited video of democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden claimed he had called for a “physical revolution” when asked about how to work with Senate Republicans who oppose his agenda. But the shared clip removed important parts of Biden’s quote before and after those words, changing the meaning of his real answer. Read related article Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) was filmed having an exchange with children and teenagers asking her to support the Green New Deal. The Sunrise Movement posted select portions of the conversation online. Although the tense moments shared initially from the exchange were accurate, the full video shows a more nuanced conversation. Read related article A video of a supposed “sting” on Planned Parenthood by Live Action was heavily edited to omit large swaths of the conversation — the result is a video in which a Planned Parenthood staffer appears to be encouraging the selective abortions of girls. Read related article Stay on top of the truth. Sign up for the Fact Checker newsletter. Count the pinocchios with a weekly review of what's true, false or in-between in politics, sent every Friday by The Post's famous fact-checking team. Splicing Editing together disparate videos fundamentally alters the story that is being told. “The Really Online Lefty League,” a left-leaning PAC, published a false Facebook ad on Oct. 24, 2019 incorrectly making it sound like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) endorsed the Green New Deal by re-arranging his words from a press conference. Read related article During the 2016 presidential campaign, a pro-Clinton political ad combined President Trump’s quotes over other footage and excluded key context. The video plays Trump saying: “This is the Trump theory on war. I’m really good at war. I love war, in a certain way.” And then after a quick dip to black, immediately plays, “Including with nukes, yes, including with nukes.” But his comment about nuclear weapons was actually in reference to Japan using nuclear weapons to defend itself from North Korea. Read related article In his campaign film, “The Road We’ve Traveled,” former president Barack Obama offered a misleading account of his mother’s insurance struggles. In the film, different interviews are cut together to make it seem like she was denied health insurance on the account that her cancer was preexisting condition. In reality, the dispute was over disability coverage — a different issue altogether. Read related article CRTV took soundbites from an interview Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez conducted with another news outlet and edited together with footage of its own anchor asking questions. In less than 24 hours, the video had nearly 1 million views. CRTV later said the video was satire. Read related article

Malicious Transformation Part or all of the video has been manipulated to transform the footage itself. Doctoring Altering the frames of a video — cropping, changing speed, using Photoshop, dubbing audio, or adding or deleting visual information — can deceive the viewer. President Trump tweeted a doctored video of a Nickelback music video with a photoshopped image to promote a discredited corruption claim about former vice president and 2020 Democratic candidate Joe Biden. Read related article A photoshopped gif was circulated on social media showing Parkland student and gun-control advocate Emma Gonzalez tearing the U.S. Constitution in half. The original image was posted in a Teen Vogue story about teenage activists and shows Gonzalez ripping up a gun-range target. Read related article The White House shared video of CNN’s Jim Acosta that was edited to make his interaction with an intern at a briefing appear more aggressive. Side-by-side comparisons of the original video and the version shared by the White House showed the footage was manipulated by adding repeated frames. Read related article Videos of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) were altered to make her sound as if she was drunkenly slurring her words. These videos spread rapidly across social media and were viewed millions of times. These manipulations were a clear attempt to shape public perception and score political points. Read related article Fabrication Using Artificial Intelligence to create high-quality fake images simulates audio and convincingly swaps out background images. Deepfakes and other synthetic media fall into this category. Digital artist Bill Posters and the Future Advocacy group published “deepfake” videos on Nov. 12, 2019 of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Labour Party’s Jeremy Corbyn, falsely endorsing each other. Read related article MIT’s Center for Advanced Virtuality developed a “deepfake” video published in Nov. 2019 of former president Richard Nixon giving a speech about a failed Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969, which was written for him but never delivered. Read related article In this example, artificial intelligence was used to manipulate images and audio to make something appear to have occurred that did not. Here, Nicolas Cage’s face is planted onto a clip of President Trump from his State of the Union speech. Read related article Artificial intelligence was used to create a “deepfake” video of former president Barack Obama saying things he never said; public insults of President Trump and curses, for instance. Jordan Peele, a noted Obama impersonator, was actually generating Obama’s speech in previously aired footage. Read related article A computer-generated image of Mark Zuckerberg was merged with actual footage of his body and synced to an actor’s audio recording. In the video, deepfake Zuckerberg describes himself as “one man, with total control over billions of people's stolen data.” This is is one of the most advanced forms of faking video. Read related article