Twitter flagged a video shared by the second-ranking House Republican on Saturday as “manipulated,” as it spliced quotes together from an activist who speaks through computer voice assistance, making it sound as though he’d convinced Joe Biden to defund police departments.
“I have lost my ability to speak, but not my agency or my thoughts,” Ady Barkan wrote to Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the House minority whip, in a Sunday tweet. “You and your team have doctored my words for your own political gain. Please remove this video immediately. You owe the entire disability community an apology.”
The dispute came down to two words from an interview Biden gave Barkan at the start of July. Barkan, who has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), speaks with the use of a device that reads his eye movements and translates them to an artificial voice. The interview, one of many that Barkan had done with Democratic presidential candidates, turned at one point to whether Biden would shift some funding from armed policing to social welfare.