The audio track of a clip showing Biden talking to people in the crowd after his Feb. 7, 2023, State of the Union Address was edited to fabricate a conversation that never happened.
On or about Sept. 13, 2023, a captioned video went viral on X (formerly Twitter) and other platforms that purported to show a bewildered-seeming U.S. President Joe Biden having to be told by a whispering staffer, "We're in the capital [sic] building and you're going the wrong way. Exit from the other side of the building like we gave in the map."
WOW!! Is this real?!?! ??? pic.twitter.com/CCGlTHQK3j
— TONY™️ (@TONYxTWO) September 14, 2023
Most of the replies to social media posts containing the clip understood it as a political dig and took it (or pretended to take it) as evidence that Biden's mental acuity was in decline. One X user wrote:
How is this not all over the media
How is this not all over Congress
Why is he still the president
Let him retire and step down with GraceI know it would be the end of the Democrat party for 25 years but come on
The reason it wasn't "all over the media" was that the clip had been doctored; no such incident had really happened. A fake audio track was added to put words in the mouth of the woman whispering to Biden. As was clearly visible (look at the above video again), the words she was supposedly whispering did not match the movements of her lips.
In a matching C-SPAN video of the same moment (post-speech chatter) during the same event (Biden's Feb. 7, 2023, State of the Union Address), what the woman said is completely inaudible. Biden's response to her is somewhat audible, if indistinct, however, and what he says to her doesn't jibe at all with the claim that she had just given him directions for leaving the building. Here's the clip with the actual, original audio:
The moment begins at the 1:31:07 mark in C-SPAN's full video of the 2023 State of the Union Address.