This is what they’re worried about…

A viral video speculating that Joe Biden is either dead, multiple people, a deepfake, or some combination of all of those has been viewed more than a million times on Twitter.

The original post is from the Twitter account for the band Five Times August, led by Dallas-area musician Bradley James Skistimas. The account has 91,000 followers. He posted two pictures of Biden from two different occasions, giving two separate addresses—one about gas prices, and another from remarks given at a conference—next to each other. “Two videos posted within a couple of hours of each other. I mean… you tell me what’s going on here… 🧐,” the post said.

@FiveTimesAugust followed this up later with a video composite of the two videos that these images were taken from, that cuts back and forth between those appearances one sentence at a time…The video has been used as “evidence” of all sorts of things by various people: that Biden is now being played by various actors (“2 more new Joe Bidens have dropped, to go along with the previous 4?” one tweet says); that he is a deepfake (“my eye can detect the uncanny valley instantly. This is 100% deepfake technology. They pasted Biden’s face on an actor. I’d bet my career on it,” a right-wing political cartoonist tweeted); and that there is simply something off (you figure it out, the tweets suggest).

RTFA…we have a video and an accompanying conspiracy theory…part of the panoply of “modern” communications that excites a certain number of folks. And I find predictable, repetitive, unproductive of anything usefully changing society…eventually boring.