Nancy Pelosi is back on the sauce.
Just yesterday, I wrote a post—which you should read as a primer for this one—about that video of Nancy Pelosi that had been edited with next-generation AI and nano-bot technologies available only to the world’s foremost digital audio forensics engineers to make her sound less than perfecty sloober. I didn’t think I’d write another post about such a silly thing so soon, but then Pelosi, the Speaker of the US House of Representatives and maybe the second or third most powerful person in American politics, went and commented on the matter in an interview with the public radio station in her district.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday strongly rebuked Facebook, saying the company’s refusal to take down altered videos of her demonstrated how the social network contributed to misinformation and enabled Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
“We have said all along, poor Facebook, they were unwittingly exploited by the Russians,” Ms. Pelosi said in an interview with the public radio station KQED. “I think wittingly, because right now they are putting up something that they know is false.”
(…)
In her comments on Wednesday, Ms. Pelosi said the company’s unwillingness to take down the misleading videos showed that Facebook was “lying to the public.”
“I think they have proven — by not taking down something they know is false — that they were willing enablers of the Russian interference in our election,” she added.
So because Facebook won’t take down a video of Nancy Pelosi that has been slowed to three-quarter speed, they are “lying to the public,” and this proves that they willingly helped Russia’s 2016 election interference effort. (!!!) The Times piece also all but explicitly draws a direct line from “false” content like the Pelosi video to the live-streaming of mass murder.
The comments to the radio station, which is based in San Francisco and broadcasts to much of Ms. Pelosi’s district in Northern California, could escalate the clash between lawmakers and Facebook. Officials from both parties have criticized Facebook for acting too slowly to police harmful content, such as a live stream of a shooting this March in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Pelosi says that while she can handle the heat, having spent so much time “in the arena,” she of course goes on to lament the loss of future great female leaders in public life because of the horrible treatment they’ll receive, like having their voice slowed to three-quarter speed so that they sound inebriated. Hillary Clinton, naturally, had Pelosi’s back, inexplicably also claiming that the edited video was “sexist.”
In a commencement address in New York on Wednesday, Mrs. Clinton criticized what she called “the big social media platforms,” which she said “know their systems are being manipulated by foreign and domestic actors to sow division, promote extremism and spread misinformation.”
“But they won’t get serious about cleaning up their platforms unless consumers demand it,” she said.
Mrs. Clinton then raised Facebook’s refusal to remove what she called a “fake” video of Ms. Pelosi.
“It wasn’t even a close call,” she said. “The video is sexist trash.”
“YouTube took it down,” she added, but “Facebook kept it up.”
I don’t want to repeat exactly what I said yesterday, but it is absolutely insane that the Speaker of the House and the former Secretary of State and who knows how many others are demanding that social media companies remove content like slowed down videos or highly edited super-cuts because they’re false.
The comparison isn’t perfect, but Pelosi’s demands aren’t all that far afield from the Chinese government censorship of images of Winnie the Pooh, or the enforcement of Islamic prohibitions on depictions of the prophet Mohammed. The idea that Nancy Pelosi or any other public figure has some special right to never be depicted online in a way that is not strictly in keeping with reality isn’t a slippery slope to some dismal authoritarian future, it is the dismal authoritarian present, with YouTube claiming that a video slowed to three-quarter speed violates their policies.
Facebook and Twitter and YouTube have a responsibility to make sure that their platforms are not used in ways that cause actual harm—like, for instance, live-streaming mass murder, or even plain old-fashioned single murder. Hosting videos of political leaders sounding vaguely dumber than they actually are is not harmful to anyone that matters in any meaningful way. It took me five minutes to make the below shitty slowed-down version of Nancy Pelosi’s biggest, baddest moment of 2019 so that she sounds like she had a couple of mimosas before her meeting with the big boy president. It is not a threat to anything at all, except, apparently, her ego.
As I said yesterday, Nancy Pelosi videos slowed down to three-quarter speed are not a threat to democracy, but believing so might actually be—and allowing politicians the authority to determine how precisely they are permitted to be depicted online might be, too.
