Facebook labels newly viral Nancy Pelosi video as 'partly false'

The video is selectively slowed down and spliced together, fact checkers say.

Laura Hautala Former Senior Writer

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Laura Hautala

Aug. 3, 2020 3:55 p.m. PT

gettyimages-1214194747 — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi speaks at a press conference in May. An altered video of the event went viral on Facebook over the weekend.
Getty Images

Third-party fact checkers working with Facebook say a newly viral video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been altered to make her speech appear slurred, giving her the appearance of being intoxicated. FactCheck.org said the video is slowed down in places and spliced together from different moments of the San Francisco Democrat's appearance at a May 20 press conference.

The video has been seen more than 2.5 million times and now carries a label of "partly false."

Facebook didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. FactCheck.org is a program of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

This isn't the first time an altered video of Pelosi has appeared on the social media platform. A video from May 2019 took a similar technique of slowing down parts of her speech to make her appear intoxicated.

In February 2020, another video circulated of Pelosi, this time making it look like she tore up a copy of a speech given by US President Donald Trump after he honored a Tuskegee airman and members of the US military. In reality, Pelosi tore up a copy of Trump's State of the Union speech after he addressed lawmakers that month.