On the menu today: Think of this as a catch-up day, covering the use of AI-generated pictures misleading people and attempting to spread panic, to the on-and-off presidential ambitions of Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin, to the motivation behind Harry and Meghan’s tall tale of their Fast and the Furious-style chase through Manhattan. Finally, we have one more example of President Biden no longer being a reliable source on what his own policies are.

Fake Images and Twitter’s Verification Problem

The Pentagon did not blow up yesterday.

You probably figured that out, but for a short time yesterday morning, some people around the world and on Wall Street weren’t entirely sure. An AI- or computer-generated image popped up on social media, claiming to show photos of an “explosion near the Pentagon building,” and then separately said there were “initial reports of a large explosion near the White House.”

The Pentagon Force Protection Agency and Arlington County Fire Department issued a statement saying that they were “aware of a social media report circulating online about an explosion near the Pentagon. There is NO explosion or incident taking place at or near the Pentagon reservation, and there is no immediate danger or hazards to the public.”

The Russian state-news outlet, RT News — which is like the old Soviet propaganda rag Pravda without all the reliable fact-checking — sent the image out to its 3.1 million followers.

NBC News:

The image appears to have first been shared on Twitter by an account with the handle @CBKNews121 at 8:42 a.m. ET. That account, which is verified, includes a variety of iconography associated with conspiracy theories, including John F. Kennedy Jr. as its profile picture. QAnon believers falsely claim John F. Kennedy Jr. faked his own death and will run for vice president with Donald Trump in 2024. . . .
The spread of the tweet appeared to spook some investors. The S&P 500 dropped sharply in the minutes after the image was amplified by well-followed accounts. It later recovered those losses.

That account also contends that the British Royal family are lizard people and posts purported photos of Bigfoot. If you’re the kind of person who sells your stocks over an unverified photo of an explosion of a building that . . . really doesn’t look that much like the Pentagon or any other real building in northern Virginia, maybe you should turn things over to a less jittery broker. Or, at minimum, switch to decaf.

Then again, a few of the Twitter accounts that were spreading the claim that the Pentagon had blown up are “verified” — meaning they paid the eight dollars for the little blue check mark and not much else. Whatever the blue check mark used to mean — and under the old management, it was never meant to indicate that a particular user was important or good, just that Twitter had verified that the account was controlled by the public figure it claimed to represent — it now merely means the person paid eight bucks. One of the verified accounts spreading the fake pictures of the Pentagon explosion was “BloombergFeed,” which is — I should say “was,” as the account is suspended — designed to look like part of Bloomberg News.

Meanwhile, the Russian “news” service, RT, is not suspended; I guess Twitter’s current mentality is that you get suspended for initially creating fake news and false images and passing them off as reality, but not for retweeting and spreading those images.

As you likely know, RT is funded by the Russian government, and in Vladimir Putin’s own words, “It cannot help but reflect the Russian government’s official position on the events in our country and in the rest of the world one way or another.” RT is, at minimum, Russian state-funded and -influenced media, and I think there is near-overwhelming evidence that it is Russian state-controlled. (Ask Jamie Kirchick about his final appearance on the network.)

I notice that on Twitter, RT is now identified as just a “Media & News Company”; if you click on the label, Twitter informs you, “Categories are self-selected and not assigned, verified, or endorsed by Twitter.” It feels like the rules over at Twitter are changing fast. It was just last month that National Public Radio loudly quit Twitter because it was labeled “state affiliated media,” then “state-funded media.” NPR hasn’t returned to Twitter, but now it isn’t labeled anything.

Twitter’s cooperation with the Turkish government’s speech restrictions during the first round of that country’s elections demonstrated that Elon Musk’s much-touted commitment to free speech is a lot more conditional and shaky than he wants people to believe. (As our old friend Kevin Williamson attempted to explain, “You cannot be a champion of free speech and a champion of the ‘will of the people’ at the same time.”) I think we can now declare that the current Twitter policy on verification or blue checks is incoherent, counterproductive garbage. If trolling, misinformation, or disinformation accounts can get blue checks, but more reliable sources who aren’t willing to shell out eight bucks don’t have them, what’s the point? To announce to the world who was willing to pay the eight bucks?

Last week, I wrote that so far, AI-generated images were not all that convincing and that social-media users had proven capable of quickly noticing that they don’t look quite right. I contended that AI-generated images were likely to only be effective at fooling the kinds of people who wanted to be fooled — and were in fact quite likely to backfire on the user, assuming the user cared about maintaining a reputation for credibility. The fact that a couple stock traders panicked runs counter to my conclusion, but the fact that the overwhelming majority of stock traders — and everyone else — didn’t panic is supportive evidence.

Youngkin: To Run, or Not to Run

Axios reports, “Top Republican sources” say “Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin is reconsidering a bid for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, after earlier taking himself out of the race as polls made former President Trump look increasingly formidable.”

Virginia holds its state legislative elections this year, as well as school-board elections, and as you’ve probably noticed, school-board fights are a bigger deal than they used to be.

This means that if Youngkin wants to run for president, he is unlikely to announce a campaign before the second week of November. The specific date for the Republican Iowa caucus is not set, but if Iowa and New Hampshire stick to their traditional schedule, it will be late January/early February 2024. That would leave Youngkin with a very narrow window in which to organize a presidential campaign.

But it is likely that by November, we will have a better sense of how Florida governor Ron DeSantis is running against Donald Trump. The first debate is tentatively scheduled for August in Milwaukee, and the second debate is scheduled for the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, likely September or possibly October.

If it is a tight two-man race, Youngkin may look at the GOP contest and decide it’s not worth it; by the standards of politicians, he’s still a young man at 56. But if DeSantis has made his debut and had his first showdowns with Trump on a debate stage and flopped, maybe a lot of non-Trump-supporting Republicans will be looking around for another, and better, option. In other words, Youngkin’s decision may well be made for him by the course of events.

Harry and Meghan: Taxpayers Should Pay for Our Security

Sooner or later, life often does provide answers. For example, last week, Harry and Meghan offered an implausible tale of being terrorized in midtown Manhattan and barely surviving a more-than-two-hour-long, white-knuckle paparazzi chase.

The Associated Press, this morning:

A London judge ruled Tuesday against Prince Harry in his efforts to pay for police protection when he visits Britain.
A High Court judge rejected the Duke of Sussex’s assertion that the British government exceeded its authority when it denied him the right to hire police to provide security in the U.K.
The British government stopped providing security after Harry and his wife, Meghan, quit their royal duties and moved to California in 2020. A lawyer for the government argued in court that it should allow hiring of “police officers as private bodyguards for the wealthy.”
Harry has said he doesn’t feel safe visiting Britain with his young children, and has cited aggressive press photographers.
The case was argued last week on the same day Harry and Meghan sought cover from paparazzi in a New York police station after a spokesperson said they had been involved in a “near catastrophic car chase” with photographers after a gala event.

This does explain why the couple would be so motivated to paint themselves as helpless victims, unable to keep those aggressive swarms of paparazzi at bay, with only their four SUVs’ worth of security to protect them.

ADDENDUM: Over at the G-7, President Biden referred to “this silly balloon,” which, contrary to his administration’s initial statements, “was able to gather intelligence from several sensitive American military sites.” Also at the G-7, our Jimmy Quinn noticed that Biden said the lifting of sanctions on China’s defense minister, General Li Shangfu, was “under negotiation right now.” Here’s U.S. State Department spokesman Matt Miller, yesterday:

QUESTION: Is the State Department considering whether to lift sanctions on Chinese Minister of National Defense Li Shangfu?
MR MILLER: No, we are not. We — I’ll leave at that. No, we are not.
QUESTION: President Biden said during the press conference in Japan that it’s under negotiation. So are you saying that the — President Biden have different —
MR MILLER: Very — I — very much not so. He also made clear that we are not planning to lift any sanctions on him or on China more broadly.
QUESTION: But is the U.S. entertaining the idea of whether to not to lift sanctions to — for negotiation purpose?
MR MILLER: No.

I suppose it is possible that the U.S. is negotiating the lifting of the sanctions, but those negotiations are secret, Biden blurted them out, and Miller is stuck issuing false denials. But man, that’s a sweeping and emphatic denial — one that goes so far that it insists the president said the opposite of what he actually said.

I’m a fan of Occam’s Razor, and so the simplest explanation is that our doddering 80-year-old president doesn’t remember what he’s told in briefings and just wings it when he’s answering questions off the cuff.

It would be hilarious if it weren’t so darn sad and concerning. President Biden, honest to goodness, really is no longer a reliable source on what his own administration’s policies are.