Meta Board Says Fake Videos Are Bad, but That Fake Biden One Is OK

Meta’s Oversight Board decided Monday that a Facebook video manipulated to show President Joe Biden behaving inappropriately with his granddaughter can stay on the platform, because the company’s own moderation policy tied the board’s hands.

The video, which was posted last spring, shows Biden putting an “I Voted” sticker on his adult granddaughter’s chest. The clip was edited to make it look like he repeatedly and inappropriately touched her chest. When a user first reported the video, Facebook parent company Meta decided not to take it down. So the user appealed the decision to the Oversight Board, an independent agency tasked with moderating content on Meta’s platforms.

The board determined Monday that the video does not violate Meta’s manipulated media policy, which only applies to videos that have been manipulated with artificial intelligence to make it seem as if someone said something they did not. The policy does not apply to manipulated audio, however.

The rule is too narrow to affect the video in question, the board said, but that doesn’t make the rule good. In fact, the board warned that the policy is problematic in and of itself and could contribute to increased disinformation during the 2024 election cycle.

“The Board is concerned about the Manipulated Media policy in its current form,” the Board said in its decision, “finding it to be incoherent, lacking in persuasive justification and inappropriately focused on how content has been created, rather than on which specific harms it aims to prevent (for example, to electoral processes).”

“The policy should not treat ‘deep fakes’ differently to content altered in other ways,” the board said. “The current policy does not clearly specify the harms it is seeking to prevent. Meta needs to provide greater clarity on what those harms are and needs to make revisions quickly, given the record number of elections in 2024.”

As artificial intelligence improves, the number of so-called “deepfakes” is increasing. A deepfake is an artificially created form of media intended to make it appear that someone said or did something they did not.

During the New Hampshire primary in January, state Democratic voters received a robocall that used a digitally manipulated recording of Biden urging them to “save” their votes and not participate in the primary.

Representative Nancy Mace’s former staffers agree on one thing: The South Carolina lawmaker’s work culture is “toxic.”

As of Monday, every member of Mace’s staff had turned over since November 1, 2023, shortly after Mace joined hands with seven other House Republicans to oust former Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

Eight employees turned in their resignations after Mace fired her former chief of staff Dan Hanlon, reported The Daily Beast. Hanlon is now running against her in the 2024 primary race for South Carolina’s 1st congressional district.

Those who tapped out on their own accord include her deputy chief of staff Richard Chalkey, her legislative director Randal Meyer, communications director Will Hampson, a financial adviser, a staff assistant, two legislative assistants, and her military legislative assistant.

According to former staff, Mace was “abusive” and “all about control,” utilizing staff not as people “but as property,” reinforcing that environment via unauthorized software systems to constantly “micromanage the office all day and into the night and early morning.”

“If she needed us, we had to answer within eight minutes,” one staffer told the Beast, clarifying that the eight minute mark was a “rule.”

“Nancy is delusional as a boss,” the unidentified employee continued. “She says nothing publicly without her consultants or senior staffers telling her to, but takes credit for everything. She’s a walking teleprompter.”

Another former staffer went further, taking a jab at Mace for recently onboarding disgraced former Representative George Santos’s communications director, Gabrielle Lipsky, to fill the void.

“All this is why pretty much every staffer and fellow member on the Hill thinks she’s a joke,” the staffer told the publication. “Also a big reason why she’s only able to hire former George Santos staffers right now.”

Mace’s new crew tried to brush off the massive turnover as a “non-issue,” according to the Beast.

“​​New coach, new team in the DC office,” Mace’s new chief of staff, Lori Khatod, wrote the outlet in a text message.

Senator James Lankford, the primary Republican negotiator on the Senate’s recently revealed border deal, is running out of patience with the rest of his party.

Lankford has been working for months on a bipartisan bill to address the U.S.-Mexico border, as well as funding for Ukraine and Israel. But the measure, which was revealed Sunday, was immediately met with Republican backlash.

And the GOP’s response is starting to wear Lankford down. The Oklahoma senator called out his party’s two-facedness on the border during an interview Monday.

“The key aspect of this, again, is, are we as Republicans going to have press conferences and complain the border is bad and then intentionally leave it open?” Lankford said on Fox News.

“Are we going to just complain about things, or are we actually going to address and change as many things as we can?”

The bill has received mixed support on both sides, with some Democrats saying that the immigration measures are too draconian. But Republicans have been quietly working for months to actually tank the bill entirely, out of loyalty to Donald Trump.

Republican lawmakers have repeatedly indicated that they don’t want to support the bill in case it ends up helping Joe Biden get reelected. Instead, they would rather continue to fearmonger about immigration in the hopes that Trump wins the 2024 election and can crack down on the border.

House Speaker Mike Johnson called the border deal “dead on arrival” in the chamber. Lankford noted Monday that Johnson had made that comment before he’d actually read the bill.

Lankford has been steadily losing his mind over Republicans’ response to the bipartisan bill. In late January, he said on Fox News that he was just trying to give his party what they have been demanding: a more restrictive border policy.

“Now, it’s interesting, a few months later, when we’re finally getting to the end, they’re like, ‘Just kidding, I actually don’t want a change in law because it’s a presidential election year,’” he said.

Republican Senator James Lankford is calling B.S. on House Speaker Mike Johnson’s newest excuse for killing the border deal.

After months of brutal negotiations, the Senate on Sunday unveiled a $118 billion bipartisan agreement to address security at the U.S.-Mexico border. The deal would tighten standards for asylum, send billions in long-awaited aid to U.S. allies like Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, and would create a standard for shutting down the southern border if daily benchmarks for illegal crossings are reached. So, in other words, it does exactly what a lot of Republicans wanted.

Johnson, who declared the bill “dead on arrival,” seems keen to continue to drag out the ordeal—this time, apparently, because he felt uninvolved.

“Well, when they began to do the negotiation, I suggested immediately after taking the gavel, I suggested to the Senate leadership that the House should be involved,” Johnson said on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday.

“We should be in the room. I wanted to send the chairmen of our committees of jurisdiction to be a part of that negotiation. And they said, ‘No, no. Let the Senate take care of it. We’ll send you something … that’s palatable.’ What we’re hearing right now is not,” he continued.

But Lankford, who served as the lead GOP negotiator on the bill, claims that’s completely made up.

According to Lankford, Johnson was asked “early on” if he wanted to be “engaged on this,” reported CNN’s Manu Raju.

“He said the House has already spoken,” Lankford said, referring to House Republican bill H.R. 2, an extreme asylum-limiting immigration bill that has effectively zero chance of passing in the Democrat-controlled Senate.

Since then, Johnson has been “loosely briefed” on the Senate talks, according to Lankford, who added that if the Senate deal were already law, “the border would have literally been closed every day for the last four months.”

Johnson’s reluctance to meaningfully act on the border can be traced back to recent Republican confessions that dragging out the border crisis actively helps Donald Trump and hurts President Joe Biden in their race for the White House.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer had his own two cents for Johnson on Monday, urging the leader of the lower chamber to “do the right thing.”

“I say to Speaker Johnson: Don’t let the 30 hard-right people in the House who are extreme — they wanted us to default, they wanted the government not to pay its debts, they wanted … the government to shut down. They’re extremists, and they’re running your show,” Schumer said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.

“You know what the right thing to do is. You know we need to fix our border. You know that it has to be bipartisan,” he added.

Schumer has promised to hold a procedural vote to advance the package on Wednesday. It’s currently unclear if the deal has the 60 votes it needs to pass, however. A couple dozen Republican senators are expected to vote against the deal, according to Lankford, and several Democrats are also expected to torpedo the package.

“If you believe, as I do, that we must secure the border now, doing nothing is not an option,” Biden said on Sunday, throwing his weight behind the deal.

Senator J.D. Vance has essentially admitted he would have carried out a coup during the 2020 election if he could have, in a bald-faced attempt to be chosen as Donald Trump’s running mate.

The Ohio Republican has been floated alongside Representative Elise Stefanik as a possible Trump vice presidential pick. And in an effort to outdo his reported competition, Vance gave a full-throated defense of autocracy during an interview with ABC on Sunday.

When asked if, had he been vice president in 2020, he would have certified the election results, Vance said he would have done things a little differently.

“If I had been vice president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there,” Vance said, referring to the fake pro-Trump electors that some states’ Republicans tried to send to Washington.

“That is the legitimate way to deal with an election that a lot of folks, including me, think had a lot of problems in 2020. I think that’s what we should have done.”

It’s unclear what Vance is basing that supposed legitimacy on, considering the Constitution makes no mention of this. Former Vice President Mike Pence has repeatedly stressed that he certified the votes in 2020, against Trump’s wishes, because he was loyal to the Constitution. There has also been no evidence that the election was fraudulent. Not even investigators hired by Trump have found issues.

Vance also said that the president can ignore Supreme Court rulings he doesn’t like.

“The Constitution says that the Supreme Court can make rulings … but if the Supreme Court said the president of the United States can’t fire a general, that would be an illegitimate ruling,” Vance claimed.

This is false: Supreme Court rulings must be obeyed by everyone. That is the whole point of the system of checks and balances established by the Constitution.

Despite being a Trump critic during his career as a writer, Vance quickly changed his tune once he entered politics. Trump even endorsed Vance when he ran for the Senate in 2022. Since coming to Washington, Vance continues to express his seemingly limitless support for Trump, such as by blocking judicial nominations to protest Trump getting indicted.