'Cheap fake' video clip posted online misstates Fetterman's pick to win Pennsylvania

During a Newsmax segment lasting more than eight minutes Wednesday, Democratic U.S. Sen. John Fetterman said a half-dozen times he thought Vice President Kamala Harris would win Pennsylvania in the general election.

But Fetterman misspoke once, using the word “he” instead of “she,” in another portion of the interview on the conservative news channel.

And that 18-second clip, posted on X by a Republican National Committee account and then reposted by a right-wing social media strategist, has now been viewed more than 1 million times.

WE AGREE, FETTERMAN: "If you match up Trump and Harris ... I do believe he's gonna win Pennsylvania." pic.twitter.com/OR4ImVXABA

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) August 7, 2024

“WE AGREE, FETTERMAN: ‘If you match up Trump and Harris … I do believe he’s gonna win Pennsylvania,” RNC Research posted at 6:21 p.m. Wednesday.

Eleven minutes later, Chuck Callesto, who labels himself a social media strategist, reposted the same video on X, “JUST IN: Fetterman makes bold prediction, says TRUMP will win Pennsylvania.”

Nowhere in either of the posts is the original full interview or a link to it. There is no context for the comment from Fetterman that stuck out for its dissonance.

Messages left with the RNC and Callesto were not immediately returned Thursday.

A spokesman for Fetterman declined to comment other than to point out the full video on YouTube, noting the senator said repeatedly Harris will win the state.

During the interview Wednesday on Newsmax with Greta Van Susteren, Fetterman spoke about the role Pennsylvania will play in the upcoming general election, as well as his belief that Erie is the bellwether for how the state votes.

He also said whoever wins Pennsylvania will become president.

About 3 minutes 13 seconds into the interview, Fetterman made his first prediction about Harris.

“I fundamentally believe that Harris is going to be able to carry Pennsylvania regardless of whoever she has chosen to be her running mate,” Fetterman said.

Then he went on: “I think if you match up Trump and Harris, which I think that’s what this really is about, then I do believe he’s gonna win Pennsylvania.”

He continued, “And of course it’s gonna be close, but I’ve been maintaining that whether it’s Biden, whether it’s Clinton, or Vice President Harris, it’s gonna be very close, and I do believe she’s going to prevail.”

Four more times throughout the rest of the interview, Fetterman was explicit in saying Harris would win.

“It’s gonna be close, and I think the argument and the kind of record Harris is bringing to this is going to be able to prevail,” he said. “Pennsylvania is going to be close, and I do fundamentally believe Harris/Walz is going to prevail on that.”

And finally: “At the end of the day, I think the Harris/Walz message is going to prevail and that’s what Pennsylvania is looking for, and that’s why I fundamentally believe Pennsylvania will pick the president, and that’s why Harris is going to be our next president.”

But none of that is contained in the 18-second video clip, which experts call “a cheap fake.”

That term, first coined by misinformation researchers in 2019, according to journalism nonprofit PolitiFact, is a twist on the term deep fake.

A cheap fake, the experts said, is when a video or audio clip is selectively edited or taken out of context to change its meaning.

It’s easy to do and can easily manipulate those who see or hear it, said Jennifer Stromer-Galley, an information studies professor at Syracuse University.

“What you saw with the clip of Fetterman — that was taken out of context and repackaged to say the opposite of what he had been saying — is not new,” she said.

Stromer-Galley referenced an early version of the cheap fake that ran as a commercial during the Bush-Dukakis presidential campaign in 1988. In that ad, the Bush campaign took clips from Dukakis riding in a tank — part of his own campaign event — and changed it to mock his stance on America’s military forces.

“The difference, though, right now is the social media metaverse we live in — anybody can take 10 seconds of video, pull it out of context, repackage it and have a large following spread it like wild fire through the stratosphere,” Stromer-Galley said.

Having a coordinated group of people pushing false information is a threat to democracy, she said.

“People need factually correct information to make good decisions,” Stromer-Galley said. “There’s just so many. It’s really problematic.”

Social media platform X is a “hotbed of factually incorrect information,” she said.

“It is worrisome that so many people are increasingly getting their news from these ‘snackable,’ unverified sources of information.”

To protect themselves from that false information, she continued, voters need to consume a variety of news sources — and not just from the partisan echo chambers of social media.

They also, said Katie Sanders, the editor-in-chief of PolitiFact, need to do their own research and go to the original source of the information.

“If a narrative seems too surprising to be true, you might want to be suspicious about that,” Sanders said.

In this instance, she said, a Democratic senator showing such a lack of faith in the Democratic candidate for president when the rest of the party appears to be excited, fits that bill.

“My first thought would be to find the interview and just watch,” Sanders said. “Get off that Tweet and do a Google search.”

When Sanders looked at the tweet in question, she noted that it was first posted by RNC Research, which bills itself as being managed by TeamTrump and the RNC.

“People have to scrutinize the source of suspicious videos,” she said.

PolitiFact published a story in June noting the frequency with which the Trump campaign and RNC were known to promote cheap fakes targeting President Joe Biden.

Stromer-Galley thinks there needs to be more oversight.

“We need some better government enforcement to force platforms to take responsibility,” she said.

There aren’t any great ways to combat the cheap fakes online, Stromer-Galley said.

“Fetterman has the power, at least to some degree, to counter the narrative,” she said.

With 184,000 followers on X, he could post the whole video himself. But, Stromer-Galley continued, doing that just allows him and the RNC Research account to talk past each other.

“We live in a society now where every awkward moment can be captured forever and taken out of context,” Sanders said. “People need to challenge their assumptions when they see short video clips like this. Period.”