You can watch clear footage here of Biden presenting the medal to Birdwell at the White House. Nothing went wrong during the process. The false claim that Biden placed the medal “backwards” was previously vetted by Snopes, Newsweek, the Associated Press and others. After the Twitter post that received more than 2.9 million video views had been online for more than 24 hours and had received more than 2.4 million views, Twitter added a notification at the bottom of the post saying that the video had been featured “out of context”. and link to previous background checks. However, other Twitter posts of the video with similar captions, including one that had more than 971,000 video views, had not been flagged with any alerts as of Friday morning.
The poster rejects the false claim
The post, which generated more than 2.9 million video views, was tweeted on Wednesday by a dark account that has been heavily critical of Biden and promoting conspiracy theories. Anti-Biden commentators with six-figure followers then amplified that account’s inaccurate tweet, some of them adding their own claims about how the video purportedly proved that Biden was on the decline. The person who runs the dark Twitter account told CNN in a message Thursday that they found the video on Telegram, a messaging and chat app, along with the claim that the medal was back. The person said that while they know people have said “that’s the medal and it’s not backwards,” they don’t plan to take down the viral tweet. “I debated deleting it and decided not to because it’s Biden and he deserves scrutiny,” they said. You can read more here about the actions in 1968 for which Birdwell received the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for military valor. After serving in the army, Birdwell became a lawyer and eventually the chief justice of the Cherokee Supreme Court.
