On January 1 2020, a Twitter user attempting to lobby criticism on Democratic Party presidential candidate Joe Biden went a step further than a critique by posting a video that had been edited to remove context from one of his campaign speeches.
The account, which bills itself as belonging to “an exclusive ‘weird twitter’ posting collective,” posted an 18-second clip of Biden saying, “Our culture, our culture. It’s not imported from some African nation or some Asian nation” and claiming that Biden was promoting “the ‘European’ identity of America”:
Biden proclaims the ‘European’ identity of America: “Our culture is not imported from some African nation.” pic.twitter.com/mG1ys8fzWB
— ᏔმƦ????ჳ???? (@mooncult) January 2, 2020
The clip has been spread on Twitter thousands of times since it was first published. It was almost immediately refuted by anti-disinformation reporters such as CNN’s Daniel Dale, who noted that the remark actually came at the tail end of comments that the former vice president made about the permissive nature of English common law toward domestic violence, and how that needed to be addressed in the present-day United States.
What Biden actually said was:
Folks, this is about changing the culture, our culture, our culture. It’s not imported from some African nation or some Asian nation. It’s our English jurisprudential culture, our European culture, that says it’s all right. Our culture, our culture. It’s not imported from some African nation or some Asian nation. It’s our English jurisprudential culture, our European culture.
The Twitter account’s claims were further debunked by the news and media site Mediaite, which posted the entirety of Biden’s 13 minutes of remarks on the matter.