Last week, a video of Nancy Pelosi sounding less than sober started making the rounds. The extremely sophisticated editing—that is, editing capabilities available to literally anyone with access to the website YouTube.com—made it sound like Pelosi was slurring her words, apparently fooling the very credulous and always-acting-in-good-faith Rudy Giuliani, who shared and later deleted a version of the video. The president then riffed on the theme, tweeting a link to a Fox News clip in which a long Pelosi press conference had been chopped down to thirty seconds of mouth noises and misspoken words and general syllabic weirdness.

The video was quickly “debunked” by the wider news media, as though that were really necessary, as though only Sophisticated Media Knowers could have figured out that the video was not a precise depiction of reality as it happened, as though “the truth” of the situation, for those watching, had anything at all to do with the playback speed of the video.

The altered video’s dissemination highlights the subtle way that viral misinformation could shape public perceptions in the run-up to the 2020 election. Spreaders of misinformation don’t need sophisticated technology to go viral: Even simple, crude manipulations can be used to undermine an opponent or score political points.

The unwashed American moron of the hand-wringing class’s imagination is apparently such an intellectual infant that his or her vote will be impacted by a slowed-down video of Nancy Pelosi that they saw on their Facebook feed. Just picture Average White Wisconsinite, sitting at the diner, eating cheese, scrolling through his Facebook feed before heading off to the factory. He’s only just started to come around on the idea that Trump isn’t everything he hoped he’d be, but now this video of Pelosi! She sounds like she’s stroking out, or maybe drank her way through breakfast and brunch! Point to Donald Trump! MAGA vote re-secured!

It is important to acknowledge how utterly nonsensical is the idea that a video of Nancy Pelosi played at three-quarter speed could possibly move anyone to change their opinion of Nancy Pelosi. It is important to acknowledge this, because much of the chattering class, and also the website YouTube.com—again, a place where, with two clicks, you can slow down or speed up any video in their vast library—believes that such a video must not be allowed to exist. Because democracy is at stake, apparently.

The Atlantic:

When Facebook says it’s not a news company, it doesn’t just mean that it doesn’t want to fall under the legal and moral responsibilities of a news publisher. It also means that it doesn’t care about journalism in the way that newsmakers (and hopefully citizens) do, and that it doesn’t carry out its activities with the same goals in mind. And yet rather than understanding and responding to those truths, public discourse instead beats its head against a wall trying to persuade Facebook that it “can’t do” what it’s been doing with impunity. It would be much simpler and more productive to take the company at its word, since reforming it into a responsible actor concerned first with its responsibility to truth or citizenship is likely impossible.

The New Yorker:

Choosing to allow false information to circulate on Facebook is not just “interposing” the company’s value system on those who use its platform, it is actually imposing its value system on the culture at large.

US Senator Brian Schatz, Hawaii

Rhode Island House Rep David Cicilline:

Franklin Foer of The Atlantic, on PBS NewsHour:

But we all know that the flow of information comes at us so fast, so intensely, that even trained journalists have a hard time separating sometimes what's real and what's not real.

And in the case of this video, you can just see how it's just a tweet. It's not that — it's not an extreme doctoring of the video. And so how is the normal person — average person going to be able to make that distinction on their own?

Mother Jones:

Facebook is letting a video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) manipulated to make it appear as though she’s drunk or otherwise unwell stay on its platform even after YouTube has opted to remove it.

This is a collection of people from the center and center-left demanding that a three-quarter speed video of the second or third most powerful person in American politics be scrubbed from the internet because of the negative consequences to a free and open democratic society. As though your dumb uncle sharing a fake slurring video of Nancy Pelosi is the functional newsworthy equivalent of a story on the nightly news, or an article in the New York Times. As though the standard for what may appear on the social internet is that it comports with the rigorous journalistic standards of the media industrial complex. As though “don’t believe everything you read on the internet” were a forgotten, ignored admonition of a wiser age.

The slowed-down Pelosi video has precisely the same truth value as any picture posted to Facebook or Instagram with a fancy filter overlay. It is a distortion of reality that tells a “false” story, just like any Twitter feed that is only the ten funniest, pithiest thoughts a person had in a given week, rather than a running stream of dreary, self-centered thought-drafts. It’s a perfect beach vacation family photo hashtagged “best life” and “blessed” and “grateful” while mother screeches at son to stop pouring sunscreen in daughter’s eyes and father leers at the bikini’d teens splashing nearby. It’s the makeup on the news anchor’s cheeks. It is pretense and inauthentic and it is “false,” and it’s not up to anyone but the person watching to be the fucking grown-up in the room. What it definitely isn’t is a threat to the institutional democratic order. And treating it like such a threat makes infants of us all.

Here is a meme that showed up in my Facebook feed on or around Memorial Day.

That photo attached to the meme is by Frances Benjamin Johnston, and is called “Saluting the Flag at the Whittier Primary School,” taken in either 1899 or 1900, and does not appear to have anything to do with the rest of the content of the meme. As for the content, that, too, is entirely suspect, as there isn’t really a definitive “first Memorial Day,” and the holiday wasn’t made official until 1971. Of course, humans have been ‘membering their war dead for as long as there has been such a thing as war dead, because of course we have.

But history is just a story, prone to far more falsification than three-quarter speed playback, especially when meme-ified and woked-up enough to be thirstily shareable. This is a stupid fucking meme that tells a false story—and who cares?! The only thing really being injured is the dignity of the person who shared it uncritically. But if it’s true enough, if it tells a familiar or comforting enough story, the underlying truth of it won’t matter at all. Click, scan, share.

The bad version of the argument goes like this, as up above: This Nancy Pelosi video is “false” and shouldn’t be so widely distributed because people are dumb and share false things uncritically, and the harm to our institutions cannot be overstated, and therefore Facebook must step in and prevent people from seeing it. People are people-ing way too much, over there, and in far greater numbers! Somebody grab the reins! Another version of the argument, which I’m much more sympathetic to, goes like this: This Nancy Pelosi video is “false,” and like so much viral content shouldn’t be so widely distributed, like so many filtered photos and curated and perfectly adjusted published lives and nonsense memes, and therefore Facebook just really shouldn’t exist. People are people-ing way too much, over there, and in far greater numbers! Somebody get us off this thing!

But we’re not about to outlaw social media, no matter how Good that would be. In the meantime, it’s super weird to demand that these massive unaccountable corporations who run the public square but operate outside the bounds of the first amendment make all the decisions about which bullshit is too bullshit for us to see and responsibly react to. It’s only as big a menace as we allow it to be. Three-quarter speed Nancy Pelosi is not a threat to democracy, but believing so might be.