Remember last month when conspiracy theorists insisted John Fetterman, the U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, had been secretly replaced by a body double or clone? The ridiculous claim went viral on X, thanks to radical changes made by owner Elon Musk, who bought the platform back when it was known as Twitter. Now a similar claim is currently going viral about Joe Biden. And Twitter’s algorithm is making sure it’s front and center for users of the site.
Twitter has been flooded with tweets over the past 48 hours claiming that Biden is actually a guy wearing a mask made to look like the 80-year-old president. Many fixated on footage from CNN which showed Biden coming back to the U.S. from a trip to Israel.
“They’ve been pretty good up until now making sure he never spends too long in a hot room so the mask will start coming off of his chin. Here the mask is starting to coming loose, it is visible and you can see the bulging in the chin area,” right-wing political commentator Brian Cates tweeted on Wednesday.
Obviously that’s an absurd idea that previously would’ve gotten very little attention on social media outside of extremist circles. But that tweet has been seen by over 2.8 million people at the time of this writing. And it’s a predictable result of Musk’s tinkering with the site to incentivize the most outlandish content.
For starters, Musk stripped so-called “legacy” blue checkmark accounts of their verification, a program that was set up to verify the identity of notable people. The idea was to fight impersonation on the site, making sure users could trust that the person they were reading was at least who they said they were. Musk decided to charge $8 per month for “verification” and now identities are no longer verified. Having a blue checkmark just means you have $8 to spend, though many casual users still assume it must have some real importance.
Musk also introduced a program to pay users for engagement, meaning people have started posting incendiary or sometimes violent videos in order to go viral on the site. I can personally attest to the fact that I now frequently see videos of people dying in accidents or getting shot during fights in my “For You,” page, a rather grotesque way to get engagement.
And to top it all off, Musk has prioritized blue checkmark accounts in the X algorithm, which means people who post conspiracy theories are getting pushed into the “For You” feeds of countless other people on the site. I don’t follow Brian Cates on X, but the site’s algorithm still served me that tweet about Biden actually being a guy in a mask.
Other “verified” users on X have also been boosted in recent days with their own takes on the sitting president, with some claiming Biden actually died in the 1980s. One user, who also pays $8 for the blue checkmark, posted a warped video of the president filmed from what appears to be a TV screen to claim it’s not actually Biden.
“This is getting more ridiculous by the day. This is not Joe Biden,” a user called Liz Churchill tweeted on Thursday.
That tweet has been seen by over 770,000 people at the time of this writing, meaning it’s likely to see at least twice as many viewers by this time Friday.
To be clear, there’s no evidence to show that President Biden has been replaced by a clone or a guy in a mask. The man is 80 years old and the burden of time makes all our faces droopy when we’ve seen eight decades on this planet.
That being said, if you have evidence that Biden is actually being played by a guy in a mask, please drop me a line with evidence. That would be a huge scoop, to say the least. Unfortunately, Biden’s verbal trip-ups and saggy skin are perfectly in line with normal human aging. He is, after all, the oldest president we’ve ever had. And 80-year-olds don’t typically get this much screen time.
You can love him or hate him, but there’s nothing to show he’s actually an imposter. That’s Biden, wrinkles and all.
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