Why those "Biden confused" videos are misleading (and many of them lies)
It's slightly more complex than you think, but clearer than you realize.
People who have seen the full clips of many recent “Biden confused” videos in circulation know intuitively they are misleading. A video, for example, that shows Biden to be stiffening in a weird crouch is used to imply that he is soiling his pants; the longer video shows he is moving to sit down in a chair. A video shows him facing the wrong way on a stage on Normandy; additional context shows he was turning to salute the soldiers on stage. Another video claims to show him gesturing and talking to no one; the full video shows him engaging with a paratrooper.
This videos are obviously part of a larger disinformation campaign, and one that has been by all accounts quite successful. But the common conceptualizations of what make these clips misleading — even the conceptualizations adopted by those in misinformation studies — lack rigor. There are three common approaches to this issue, and all are insufficient.
Led astray. First, there is the common view that such clips are misinformation because they lead one astray. The idea here is that such clips cause one to form a wrong impression of some greater issue. In this case that issue would be the current cognitive powers of Biden. But this is problematic on many fronts. To say people are being led astray from a “correct” view of Biden’s current cognitive powers assumes that there is a correct view on that issue that we can know or expect people to abide by. There isn’t. I think stories of Biden’s cognitive decline are vastly overstated, but if you think he is in severe cognitive decline I don’t think I’d class that as misinformation. That’s something more akin to a wrong opinion. Even more tellingly, if Biden really was struggling cognitively over the past few months, then these videos — cut in deceptive ways — would still be misinformation even though the overarching claim (Biden is senile) would be true.
Didn’t happen. The argument here is usually some version of “the thing didn’t happen”. And of course, if you formulate what happened as “Joe Biden soiled himself” or “Joe Biden was talking to no one” this works (though, as a negative assertion, it is difficult to prove). However, the current method of circulating lies doesn’t get down into the muck like this. Instead, such videos are distributed without a direct gloss and left to be misinterpreted. This leads us to our last category…
Lacks context. This is a better model, but insufficient in ways often not acknowledged. Context is of course potentially infinite. The video of Biden going to sit is edited, yes, but so are all videos — they have to have a start and end point somewhere. The interesting question is why eliminating some context is OK, and eliminating some context is not.
I’m not saying that we don’t recognize intuitively what constitutes Actually Important Context. We clearly do. Take the introduction to this post:
A video shows Biden to be stiffening in a weird crouch implies that he is soiling his pants > the longer video shows he is moving to sit down in a chair.
A video shows him facing the back of the stage in Normandy > additional context shows he was turning to salute the soldiers on stage.
Another video claims to show him gesturing and talking with no one there > the full video shows him engaging with a paratrooper.
In each of these cases there were potentially infinite pieces of context I could have added. For instance, the video of Biden talking to the paratrooper does not provide context that Biden’s son was in the armed forces, or note that Biden had a good night’s sleep the night before. It doesn’t mention Biden’s height, or include footage of Biden eating breakfast. Saying it lacks context is true but meaningless without a theory as to what context is required and what context is optional.
This paucity of a lot of the current models is not merely an academic question. For instance, in defense of sharing these videos, edited and cropped in these ways prominent accounts said that the videos were real and unedited, by which they meant, I suppose, that there were no internal cuts.
The videos as misrepresented evidence
I’m a broken record on this, but what’s going on here is that the videos are misrepresented evidence. Once we see that, it’s relatively easy to formulate some rules on what sorts of eliminated context are violations of argumentative norms.
The argument here is that Joe Biden is senile. These events are presented as evidence of that supposed senility. In general you’re allowed in an argument to “spin” evidence a bit — to portray it as greater evidence than it really is. But you’re not generally allowed to conceal evidence that would show that the evidence you have is no evidence at all. And that is why the distribution of these videos is so egregious.
It’s also how we know — as humans who learn to evaluate arguments from a very early age — what pieces of context are essential. The context we choose in debunking such videos is not about showing the fidelity of the represented event to some theoretical “true” event. The context shown in a debunk is about showing how that event as portrayed is not the evidence that it is alleged to be. Reviewing our debunks you’ll see that the chosen piece of context is important — even if the video was shared without a direct statement of what it showed — because when the context is added it becomes non-evidence.
A video shows Biden to be stiffening in a weird crouch implies that he is soiling his pants > the longer video shows he is moving to sit down in a chair.
A video shows him facing the back of the stage in Normandy > additional context shows he was turning to salute the soldiers on stage.
Another video claims to show him gesturing and talking with no one there > the full video shows him engaging with a paratrooper.
And the reason why people (I think rightly) see this level of propaganda as lies and not just misleading is this point — when the relevant (and easily accessible) context is known these videos don’t simply become weaker evidence for the Theory of Biden Senility — they become non-evidence.
Such distinctions might seem pedantic. After all, why not just say they are misleading videos and be done with it? But time and time again I’ve seen people contort themselves into pretzels to explain (for example) why one video is spin and another qualifies as a lie. And of course much of misinformation studies still routinely sees misinformation as “viral wrong belief” — an approach that has done all sorts of damage to the field.
Seeing it misinformation instead as violations of norms about how evidence is to be presented and contextualized both allows us to tap into a more normative realm than fuzzy talk about “misleading narratives” as well as more precisely show the ways in which bad faith is being applied. And that’s worth the moderate increase in model complexity.