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A terrible thing did not happen in the White House press room on Wednesday. In a sudden non-attack in front of a room full of unrequited witnesses, CNN reporter Jim Acosta did not hit the ground, did not hit and did not get his hands on a young woman who was just trying to do her job as a trainee at the White House. would be a very bad thing if it had happened. But that was not the case. So it's good.
You would not know, however, if you believe a statement by Sarah Huckabee Sanders, White House press secretary, stating that the attack had occurred tweeted pretending to show the incident unfolding.
Significantly, this version of the clip, which was taken from the live full exchange diffusion and heated between Acosta and President Donald Trump, has not been changed by anyone with iMovie. It was the work of YouTube's personality, conspiracy theorist and accomplished troll, Paul Joseph Watson, editor of the InfoWars plot site and former contributor to the über Alex radio show, the conspiracy hangman. Together, Watson and Jones peddled notions that were not peer-reviewed, such as the danger of chemtrails and the approach of the New World Order. So, not exactly the Peabody Award winners here.
Perfectly reasonable people could have perfectly reasonable disagreements as to whether Acosta was simply engaged in vigorous questioning or whether it had been escalated – a disagreement that is hardly unprecedented in the long history of White House press. What was different about Wednesday's incident was not just the fact that Watson's video was misleading, but that the White House press secretary had then made a copy of it. More disturbing was the ease with which the mounted images won believers and their ability to play on the way the human brain distinguished between what is true and what is not.
The full clip of the Acosta-Trump recount lasts two minutes and forty-three seconds, but the relevant moment comes just before the minute and a half, when Acosta speaks and a White House trainee appears to surprise him, Approaching on the side and below (she was squatting on the ground nearby) and she reached out to grab the microphone. We hear a brief arrangement of the arms, we hear Acosta saying: "Forgive me, Ma'am" in an equal voice, and the trainee retires. The Watson video lasts 15 seconds, eliminates the context and instead opts for a very close shot, repeatedly showing a moment when Acosta's hand comes in contact with the inner arm.
Watson, according to the Washington To post, calls any allegation that he has edited or changed the speed of the video to make it more abrupt or violent into a "shameless lie". But he confessed to BuzzFeed that "digitally, the rendering and the focus will be slightly different". "
Elizabeth Loftus, a professor of law and social psychology at the University of California at Irvine, does not buy it. "The videos are totally different," she says. "Someone is talented enough to do it so skillfully and quickly. They made believe that he had hit her, that he had reached out and made contact.
Loftus knows something about manipulated evidence and biased perceptions. As an authority on human memory and its imperfections, she has been an expert witness in several famous cases, including the McMartin pre-school molestation case and the litigation involving Michael Jackson as well as lacrosse players of the Duke University. His TED talk on memory garnered more than a million views. In the case of the Acosta sequence, she says, the modified video exploits not only the way we perceive our perception of what we see, but the way our political prejudices can exacerbate these manipulations.
In an article, Loftus, co-author of the book Journal of Experimental Social Psychology In 2013, she and her colleagues showed 5,296 volunteers fake photos of five ostentatious events that did not happen and asked the volunteers they remembered hearing about them or seeing them. news. On average, 27% of the subjects said they actually saw the images – which they would not have had – but the results were heavily skewed by policy direction. People who disapproved of George W. Bush, for example, were more likely to "remember" seeing a photo of him vacationing on his Texas ranch with Houston Astros pitcher Roger Clemens at the time. the Hurricane Katrina disaster; he does not have any. People who disapproved of Barack Obama were also more likely to think they remembered a picture of Obama shaking hands with the then President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, at the United Nations. It never happened either.
"People are more credible consumers of information that support their political views than information that challenges them," said Psychology Professor Peter Ditto, also of the University of California to Irvine. "Psychologists call this" reasoned reasoning. "Trump has armed this fundamental human tendency by repeatedly proposing to his followers alternative narratives of events confirming their beliefs."
The President, in all fairness, did not invent this technique, nor was he the first to use it in a calculated way. Loftus has seen the manipulation of memory and perception recur repeatedly in criminal trials, when witnesses are simply questioned in a suggestive way and their stories change accordingly. "I have also studied suggestive psychotherapy that leads people to believe that they have had childhood experiences that they did not experience," she says.
Video evidence can certainly be useful both in a courtroom and in other contexts, but only if it is used honestly. Lawyer and Professor David Paul Horowitz, who teaches the Electronic Evidence and Discovery Workshop at the Columbia University School of Law and who viewed both the original Acosta video and the one shared by Huckabee Sanders, do not think that Watson's creation would last a long time in a courtroom.
"The objection to the White House clip would probably be that the repetitive loop of a very short clip would be detrimental and would only serve to ignite the investigator," wrote Horowitz in a courier. at TIME. "The objecting party would probably request that the video be replayed, in its entirety, each time the jury would like to see it, so that the whole context of the contact is presented."
Of course, igniting the viewers was a feature of the clip, not a bug. For a known creator of conspiracy theories, creating it was bad enough, but promoting it with the full authority of the White House takes it to another level. "The possibilities," says Ditto, "are scary."
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