Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a 2020 White House hopeful, posted a doctored Instagram video Sunday showing him scaring President Donald Trump at a rally, The Hill informs.
“Want to really scare Trump? Help us show the strength of our campaign to defeat him – chip in before our fundraising deadline at midnight at the link in bio,” Sanders posted on the account along with the video.
The actual incident in the video occurred when a man attempted to breach a security line during a Trump campaign rally in March 2016.
The man was stopped and the Secret Service surrounded Trump to protect him. In the edited video, Sanders appears on the stage and startles the president. The video was posted hours before the end of second-quarter fundraising, The Hill adds.
The video, which is clearly not manipulated to appear as though Sanders was actually there, comes amid fear that doctored videos could effect the election.
“Deepfake” videos, which are created through the use of artificial intelligence technologies to manipulate original videos, entered the spotlight earlier this year after a slowed-down video of Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) went viral, The Hill notes.
While that video would not qualify as a deepfake, since it was slowed down with the quality of the audio changed and not manipulated using AI, it showed the dangers posed to politicians’ images by manipulated videos.
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