Pelosi’s deep-fake flip finger video goes viral

U.S. speaker Nancy Pelosi listened tight-lipped to president Trump's State of the Union address to Congress Tuesday, and as he wound up, she quietly ripped her copy of the speech apart, first into halves and then into quarters. This was her reply to Trump refusing to shake hands with her before the speech.

Later, when a reporter asked her about it, Pelosi said, "Because it was the courteous thing to do, considering the alternatives."

She left everyone wondering what alternatives she might have considered.

This gesture was quickly picked up by news organisations across the world and the video of her act of defiance spread like wildlife on Twitter and Instagram.

The hashtag #NancyPelosi has been trending on Twitter ever since, with users getting creative with memes and videos.

One such video was by a Twitterato named Paul Lidicul, who posted a morphed video showing Nancy Pelosi giving the finger as Trump delivered his speech. “Fixed it,” his caption read.

At first glance, the video looked real. It has been liked and re-tweeted multiple times.

With morphed videos, and fake dominating the meme world of social media, anybody with little knowledge of the deep fake, would have taken the video to be true.

Here's a link to the video:

<blockquote class="twitter-tweett;p lang="en" dir="ltr">Fixed it.<a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/NancyPelosi?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc^tfw">#NancyPelosi</a> <a href="https://t.co/LHMUTzKX3K">pic.twitter.com/LHMUTzKX3K</a></p>&mdash; Paul Lidicul (@PaulLidicul) <a href="https://twitter.com/PaulLidicul/status/1224971531094114305?ref_src=twsrc^tfw">February 5, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" data-charset="utf-8"></script>