Barack Obama Singing Call Me Maybe by Carly Rae Jepsen

"We are now getting misleading Techdirt stories secondhand through Slashdot. It's interesting to see how far this game of telephone might go." You know when I was watching President Obama's cover of the hit single "Call me maybe" [1] I was thinking the same thing. Kidding aside though, the two things that the Youtube spoof and this have in common are taking snippets of actual "stuff" and mashing them together into something that the person making the mashup finds useful/amusing/entertaining. As HN and Reddit and slashdot before them seep into the journalistic consciousness there are pretty clear efforts to craft a message based on selective sampling. By drilling into the sources for all the clips (unnecessary of course but bear with me) used to compose the 'call me maybe' video its clear that the President never set out to make this video or even knew the lyrics (probably does now though :-) and this slashdot article appears to be a lesser instance of the same effect. Pull a few bits out of context, wrap them together into a choice sounding narrative and blam! you've got a "story." So to answer your question the 'telephone' you mention is simply 'spin doctoring' (to use the 20th century vernacular) and it will continue as long as people make long enough sound bytes in their communication that they can be re-purposed for spin without setting off too many alarms in the readership. [1] [this video]

While video is currently unlikely to be entirely fabricated at this point, you might be surprised at what can be accomplished with camera angles, choosing the start and end times of your clip, and cuts and reordering of clips: for a silly example of this, see "Obama sings Call Me Maybe"[1]. Videos can also be staged with varying levels of convincingness. If you are digging for evidence, the source of your information must be taken into account. Deepfakes will probably be detectable in retrospect, even if they are not detectable at the time of publication, so if you stick with sources with a long history of only publishing real information, you're probably still fine even in the age of deepfakes. The arguable lack of journalistic sources with a demonstrated history of integrity is its own problem, but not one that is made significantly worse by the presence of deepfakes. [1] [this video]