Donald Trump twice posted a bogus video on Twitter of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, falsely edited to include NWA’s “F— tha Police” and make it look like Biden was praising the ’80s protest song.
At 12:17 a.m. ET Wednesday, Trump tweeted the video, asking, “What is this all about?” Trump again tweeted the video later Wednesday morning, with the odd comment, “China is drooling. They can’t believe this!”
Neither of the president’s tweets provide any acknowledgement that the video is fake.
Twitter labeled the fake video as “manipulated media,” noting in a message linked from the warning that the video came from a Biden campaign event Tuesday in Florida celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month. At the event, Biden actually had played the hit song “Despacito” after being introduced by singer Luis Fonsi, after which he said, “I’ll tell you what, if I had the talent of any one of these people I’d be… elected president by acclamation.” (The real video from the event was tweeted by CNN reporter Sarah Mucha.)
The fake Biden video was created by meme creator The United Spot, which says in the YouTube description on its channel, “We make pictures talk, all videos are 100% parody/satire.” (United Spot’s Twitter account bio doesn’t include that info; United Spot claims that it has been “Shadow Banned On Twitter.”) The NWA video is an attempt to play off Trump’s repeated false claims that Biden supports defunding police departments.
In the 2020 election year, Twitter has more actively flagged Trump’s posts if they are misleading or factually incorrect. In March, Twitter affixed the “manipulated media” label to a tweet posted by Trump’s head of social media — and retweeted by the president — that included a video of Biden that was deceptively truncated to make it seem as if Biden admitted Trump’s re-election was inevitable.
In May, Twitter applied a warning label hiding a post by Trump about deploying force against crowds in Minneapolis that included the phrase “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” after Twitter determined that the tweet broke its rules glorifying violence.