Social media users are claiming a clip of a recent Congressional Medal of Honor ceremony shows President Joe Biden botching the presentation of a medal to a Vietnam War veteran. But the claims are off base.
Biden honored Birdwell for his actions during his unit's attack on an airbase in 1968.
The blurry, pixelated video shows Biden placing the blue ribbon of the Army's Medal of Honor around the neck of Spc. Dwight W. Birdwell, who was honored for "repeatedly (placing) himself in extreme danger to protect his team and to defeat the enemy" during an attack that disabled his tank commander, the Army's webpage on Birdwell says. The pendant was not clearly shown in the video, and some social media posts said it had been on Birdwell's back instead of his chest.
"Biden puts medal on backwards," one user captioned the clip in a July 6 Facebook post shared more than 60 times. "Just imagine if Trump had done this."
In a Twitter post, the clip accrued more than three million views and was shared on Facebook more than 1,100 times, according to social media data aggregator CrowdTangle. Several other Facebook users created their own posts about the claim.
However, high-resolution photos and videos from the U.S. Army and numerous news outlets show Biden placed the medal correctly, as Reuters and Lead Stories previously reported. The poor quality of the social media clip...
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