Thread by @mattsheffield

🧵 During my former days as a Republican media commentator, I was always frustrated that my fellow rightwingers were so lazy and biased that they routinely promoted nonsense w/o bothering to verify.

Trump did this today falsely claiming that Kamala Harris faked a crowd w/AI...

On his Untruth Social site, Trump promoted a tweet from a low-grade Twitter user who accused Kamala Harris of using AI to fake a crowd photo.

The accusation is totally false and easily disproven by the many live videos shot by people there, as well as other photos.

The photo posted by Trump and the Twitter user is quite different than verified real photos posted by the AP of Air Force Two arriving in Minneapolis.

As you can see in the real photo, the crowd is dark and very little can be seen of their features. Not so with the other pic

As best I can tell, it seems that Xitter user @stridinstrider was one of the first to post the image on the right w the caption "Feels like a painting."

That's because his pic is similar to an AI generated painting. At the very least, it is heavily filtered w/unnatural lighting.

You can see from a live broadcast by @thehill that the the crowd, which obviously was real, was in poor lighting conditions.

The audience was in an airport hangar and in the shadow in order to keep a consistent light source at sunset.

Source:

So basically, here's what seems to have happened.
1) A person not affiliated w/Harris campaign posts an AI generated painting of a photo but doesn't explicitly say it's a painting
2) A Trump worshiper perceives that the pic looks AI-ish and then concocts an insane conspiracy theory about it
3) Trump, desperate for anything to complain about Harris about, promotes the insane conspiracy theory

This latest Trump-created hoax illustrates what I sometimes call the "human centipede of disinformation" that exists in right wing media.

Reactionary hoaxes originate often based on one person's stupidity or lack of knowledge and then they are slurped up by biased observers.

One other little tidbit before we get to the end: Trumpers have been claiming that the airplane's lack of tail numbers is proof that the photos and videos are fake.

This is their ignorance striking again. The USAF removed tail numbers for opsec purposes twz.com/air-force-c-32…

Minor correction: The photos and videos under discussion are from Harris and Walz's trip to Michigan, I accidentally typed Minneapolis.

Here are more photos from @MLive of the event mlive.com/politics/2024/…

On a personal note, I have been involved with authenticating or debunking documents for many years as a journalist.

◾I was one of the bloggers who exposed Dan Rather for presenting MS Word documents as typewritten
◾I also was the first to validate Wikileaks emails showing that Donna Brazile gave TV debate questions to Hillary Clinton.

I am willing to authenticate things that contradict my political views. This ain't one of them.

The photo Trump reposted was either AI generated or so heavily processed that it does look fake. It proves absolutely nothing, as many videos and first-hand witnesses validate to 100% certitude that Kamala Harris did NOT fake her crowd size. Trump made yet another Hoax and Lie to his dupes.

/end

PS: Whether Trump actually believes his new hoax doesn't really matter. His followers, who will believe anything he says, think Trump's lie is truth.

That said, if Trump really believes the total BS that he spouted, it means that the guy has lost all grip on reality.

He's either totally nuts, totally deceitful, or both. In ANY scenario, he is too dangerous to ever be given the presidency again.