Facebook Leaves Trump’s ‘Racist Baby’ Video on Platform After Twitter Flag

A doctored news clip shared to social media by president Donald Trump remains active and unlabeled on Facebook today, after rival platform Twitter slapped the content with a warning telling users the video was “manipulated media.”

Posting to millions of followers on Thursday across both social networks, Trump pushed out a fake CNN segment with a mis-spelled banner reading: “Terrified todler runs from racist baby.” It changes to say: “Racist baby probably a Trump voter.”

The footage was altered from a legitimate viral story published by the outlet in 2019 that showed a black toddler and a white toddler embracing on a New York street.

The video posted by the president showed the CNN-like chyron over a clip of one child chasing the other, seemingly an example of how the media spins stories.

Trump’s post, which has since been seen more than 12 million times on Twitter alone, concludes with the slogan: “America is not the problem. Fake news is.”

On Facebook, the clip has more than 17,000 comments, and has been circulated more than 54,000 times. The social network has been contacted for comment.

The altered video of the children has the watermark “CarpeDonktum,” an unidentified person who describes themselves on Twitter as an “eternally sarcastic memesmith specializing in the creation of memes to support President Donald J. Trump.”

It remains unclear if Facebook will take action on the video, which remains available on Trump’s official account at the time of writing, without a label or warning.

Currently, the social network’s official policy on manipulated media forbids video “that has been edited or synthesized, beyond adjustments for clarity or quality, in ways that are not apparent to an average person, and would likely mislead an average person to believe that a subject of the video said words that they did not say.”

But the policy “does not extend to content that is parody or satire or is edited to omit words that were said or change the order of words… said,” the guidelines add.

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