US President Donald Trump in the Oval Office in Washington. A fake post that was designed to look as if it was from Trump's social media feed spread widely online over the weekend, adding confusion to the ongoing debate over Trump's social media activity. Photo / Eric Lee, The New York Times
A fake post that was designed to look as if it were from United States President Donald Trump’s social media feed spread widely online over the weekend, adding confusion to the ongoing debate over Trump’s social media activity this past week.
Posts on X circulating the forgery reached at least 3.7 million views today.
The fake post appeared to describe Trump’s rationale for deleting a racist video that he shared this past week, which depicted former US President Barack Obama and the former first lady, Michelle Obama, as apes.
In the fake post that went up yesterday, Trump appeared to claim that the video was offensive to animals.
Though many users seemed to understand it was fake, some believed it was real, including some right-wing users who praised the President for not apologising.
The user who first published the fake post on X did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Its spread appeared to be aided in part by the confusion surrounding how Trump came to post the original racist video and why it was deleted.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, first brushed off the criticism, saying that it was a joke from a longer video depicting several Democrats as jungle animals.
Trump later pushed back on that idea while talking to reporters on Air Force One.
He said that he did not err in posting the video but that he had not seen the racist clip — which is spliced into another video about voter fraud conspiracy theories — before sending it to aides to post on his behalf.
“I gave it to the people, generally they’d look at the whole thing, but I guess somebody didn’t,” he told reporters.
The image is part of a surge of fake content that has been circulating online in recent months.
A group of right-wing influencers and meme-makers have created scores of artificial intelligence-generated jokes, videos and satirical political content that is sometimes racist and sexist, racking up millions of views.
Trump has elevated their work before.
In October, Trump posted an AI-generated video of himself piloting a fighter jet and dropping excrement on protesters.
The user who created the fighter jet video also created the racist video of the Obamas.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Stuart A. Thompson
Photographs by: Eric Lee
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