Video showing President Biden distracted by ice-cream van has been edited

A video that has over 660,000 likes on Instagram appears to show President Biden walking after an ice-cream van while Dr Jill Biden is giving a speech.

However, the scene is not genuine.

The video has been edited to include an ice-cream van moving across the background supposedly playing its traditional music.

Several people in the comments appear to think the scene is real, while others have pointed out that Dr Biden’s arm disappears for a moment, indicating that it may have been edited.  

The caption of the video is: “Pov [point of view]: you can move during a cutscene.”

A “cutscene” refers to a non-interactive clip in a videogame that usually pauses gameplay. Often the player can’t control their characters in cutscenes, but if they can, they may take the opportunity to move their character to pass the time during a video sequence they have watched many times before.

Reuters reports that the original video was posted on C-Span on 10 September 2021. 

The video’s caption is: “President Biden and first lady Jill Biden spoke at Washington, D.C.'s Brookland Middle School about the coronavirus pandemic and keeping children safe. The president urged parents to get their children vaccinated if they were eligible.”

A minute and a half into the original video, you can see the same scene that is used in the edited clip. President Biden walks behind the first lady and out of the frame before reappearing—but there’s no ice-cream van or music. 

Higher quality versions of the edited video, which also appear on YouTube and TikTok, show more clearly that the ice-cream van has been added later. A blurry video of something you would expect to have been recorded professionally or on a modern phone, as well as visual glitches, like Dr Biden’s arm, are all signs a video may have been edited.

Full Fact has fact checked many altered images in our work countering online misinformation, including a recent viral AI-generated photo of Pope Francis wearing a puffer jacket. 

Image courtesy of The White House