There’s a video going around that purportedly shows Nancy Pelosi drunk or unwell, answering a question about Trump in a slow and slurred way. It turns out that it is slowed down, and that the original video shows her quite engaged and articulate.

Two things about this. The first is that our four moves (SIFT) apply well to this incident. Specifically, the “T” in SIFT is “Trace quotes, claims, and media to the original context.” In this case you can watch the original video on C-SPAN and see the difference immediately.

But what if you can’t trace it? In general, if the provenance of the video is hidden, but clearly has an unlinked original source, wait a bit. Even decent news sources can be godawful at linking original sources, but usually for a big video like this people will point you to the original within a day or two which is what happened here.

The second thing to watch is how the media ecosystem works as, well, a system. When people look at the impact of false news they often measure how much of it makes it to mainstream broadcasts. But very often the way networked lies and mainstream news interact is synergistic. So as this false Facebook video is being circulated to millions of viewers, the Fox News show Lou Dobbs Tonight airs a different video of Pelosi with some instances of her stammering edited together and asks “What’s going on?” Age? Illness? The video pushes beyond the bounds of acceptable journalism, but within the bounds of what is currently permissible on air. The guest commentator is very muted but pointed in replies — she’s getting old, probably pushing herself too hard, maybe needs to step aside.

In musical production there is a technique called double-tracking, and it’s not a perfect metaphor for what’s going on here but it’s instructive. In double tracking you record one part — a vocal or solo — and then you record that part again, with slight variations in timing and tone. Because the two tracks are close, they are perceived as a single track. Because they are different though, the track is “widened” feeling deeper, richer. The trick is for them to be different enough that it widens the track but similar enough that they blend.

Anyway, that’s what you see with a lot of disinfo campaigns. On the wild west of social media, outright lies are spread. And usually the outright lies don’t make it to the mainstream outlets exactly as spread, but a very similar and dishonestly spun story is spread at the same time through broadcast. The two blend into one, able to use to freedom of the web to build shock and the amplification of traditional media to build a sense of veracity and extend the reach. You saw this with the caravan in 2018, Clinton’s “sickness” in 2016. And so on. Two tracks — one through viral spread and the other through official channels, blended into something more damaging than either track alone.