In President Donald Trump's most recent social media spree in which Salon's Sophia Tesfaye says he "flood[ed] the zone with chaos, and then pretend[ed] it never happened," it appears he may have been duped by "what he seemingly believed was Fox News footage."
But, alas, Salon reports, it was not Fox footage.
Trump "shared an AI-generated video promising fake alien health care technology from a conspiracy theory popular in QAnon forums," Salon explains.
The footage he shared featured an AI-generated image of himself on a fake Fox News segment touting "a new era in American healthcare" and something called a "med bed card," a fake item sold as part of a QAnon-affiliated conspiracy theory involving nonexistent medical technology. The cards supposedly provide access to "med beds," which are falsely claimed to use advanced, futuristic technology to cure any disease, regenerate limbs, and reverse aging.
That AI video, Tesfaye explains, " did not air on “My View with Lara Trump,” as it claimed, or any other Fox News show."
As for the video's well-debunked claims, investigative journalist Jacqueline Sweet discovered that the earliest mention of the video’s claim "comes from a now-deleted Instagram page that 'uses a common fake name for fake doctors in romance scams.'"
Tesfaye says that by sharing the AI footage of himself, "Trump is giving his MAGA followers false hope that he will soon grant them access to the elites’ magic product."
The Salon writer says this is "depraved and heartbreaking" because many MAGA believers have "refused medical treatment because they believe med bed tech will restore their health in minutes."
Although the president deleted the video on Sunday after huge online backlash, Trump's deep fake dupe is dangerous, Tesfaye says, and likely to continue.
"As the med bed example demonstrates, Trump is growing more vulnerable to being influenced by selective or sensational media coverage — and less likely to vet whether what he is seeing or hearing on those segments is grounded in current facts."