Facebook won’t ban Trump’s Biden video, but it will label it ‘partly false’

Did Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden endorse Donald Trump? No. But an edited video shared by the president on Facebook would like you to think so.  

On Monday, Facebook tagged the content with a that the video contained “partly false information.” The label appears before the video and users must click through the warning to view the content. The Biden campaign publicly complained about the misleading video over the weekend.

“We can only re-elect Donald Trump,” said Biden at a Saturday campaign event, “if in fact we get engaged in this circular firing squad here. It’s gotta be a positive campaign.”

Later that day, Trump’s social media director posted an edited version of the speech. That video only showed the first half of the sentence, where Biden says, “We can only re-elect Donald Trump.” More than 26 million people liked the post. 

Trump’s social media director, Dan Scavino, also shared the video on Twitter. The company took action under its new manipulated media policy, which went into effect last week. On Sunday, a day before Facebook took action, Twitter began the video as “manipulated media.” It was the first time the microblogging platform enforced its new policy.

While there are surely people who’d prefer these social networks remove the content entirely, the actions taken against Trump’s Biden video are more than they did earlier this year. There have multiple of Trump and his campaign sharing deceptively edited or manipulated video of political opponents such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. At the time, platforms like Facebook and Twitter declined to take action.

This time, it appears each platform’s policies worked as intended. But, there’s clearly still plenty of work to be done when it comes to misinformation on the internet. And, of course, with these rules recently established, there’s bound to be bad faith cases where legitimate content gets labeled as “misleading.” With the 2020 elections just getting started, misinformation looks like it’s only going to get worse.