Sigh... another day, another silly controversy coming out of the Trump Administration.
You know in some ways, you have to laugh about it a little bit. After all, it isn’t the first time that Trump’s social media antics has gotten him into trouble and cre- ated a spate of bad headlines that the administration doesn’t need in arguably the most important few months leading up to the midterm elections.
For the lucky few of you out there who somehow missed it, President Trump landed himself in hot water a few days ago when he posted a video he found to his Truth Social account that depicted his predecessor, Barack Obama and his wife Michelle as monkeys.
Without context this sounds as awful and as racist as it comes and predictably, the legacy media treated it as such.
For the President’s enemies, it was just the sort of overt racism that they have long been searching for, seemingly de- livered right into their hands at the most politically opportune moment.
But as with all of these nontroversies, there is nuance being left out here and a reasonable explanation for the post.
Ready?
The president doesn’t watch the entirety of Twitter videos and reposts things without vetting them.
What happened here was that Trump reposted a one minute long screen recorded video that rehashed the Dominion voting machine scandal of 2020.
For those that aren’t social media savvy, screen recording on a phone means that you’re capturing everything that comes across your phone’s screen at any given time.
This is an easy way to capture a video you’re interested in keeping and sharing across social platforms when you don’t have a way (or are too lazy to find one) to directly download the source video itself onto your device.
The trouble is, when you’re viewing videos and reels on Twitter and Facebook, once one video stops playing, another one is queued up to immediately play in its place. Unfortunately for Trump, the very next autoplay video was the beginning of a Lion King parody that depicted the Obama’s as monkeys.
This happened at the tail end of his repost, something he or his staffers obviously didn’t see for the entire second it appeared.
That’s the scandal in a nutshell. Trump’s carelessness and having an algorithm that is geared towards trollery has set off a firestorm of racial headlines.
So, just to get the obvious out of the way, AI generated videos depicting the Obamas is indeed racial insulting and in bad taste...