Hi! Birdwatch ML Engineer here-- these context notes are from Birdwatch. They are written and rated by users, and the notes are only added as context to Tweets if they are rated highly enough by multiple raters who have tended to disagree in the past. The core algorithm is open source as well as all of the data, and there is lots of public documentation about it too:
I honestly felt nothing but contempt for the oligarchic structure of fact checking. Facebook hired organisations like the Washington Post to do their fact checking. I have not forgotten how many people there lies killed in Iraq. I don't forget how the journalists at the time were willing to compromise their ethics in exchange for White House access and exclusive stories from the front lines, simply because journalistic interest is not the public interest. We also saw more recently during the pandemic incompetent journalists without adequate medical training censoring BMJ articles from Facebook: https://www.bmj.com/content/376/bmj.o95.
You are making one of the only tools I can see that can possibly make "fact-checking" a reality in a nominally unbias way that can be broadly accepted by the public. A democratic fact-checking system for a largely democratic website. Even if birdwatch will get things wrong, I appreciate the effort to reform this institution of "fact-checking" with something righteous and moral. No need to touch on my spicy political views, but I think this is a transparent, scalable, fair tool that can truly be embraced by the entire society rather than simply leading to a partisan divide.
Your system understands I'm on social media because I want to hear what the average person has to say, and I would go to a news website if I wanted to get a news websites take on what the facts were. To me, if a news website wants people on twitter or Facebook to pay attention to their "fact check" editorial, they should do it the same way everybody else has to. By creating compelling writing that gets attention and that people agree with.
Do you think there is a risk to "fact checking" gives the public a false sense of knowledge, and reduces certain important skills?
It seems apparent to me that, in the process of a manual substation of truth, through whatever means of research an individual chooses to check the validity of a subject, they accidentally learn more during the task of that research verification both directly through the claim that was made, and as well in that field in a more general sense.
For example: if two users are arguing over a Bible verse, and one side wishes to verify the claim the other side made, the traditional method would mean anything from reading a Wikipedia entry and a few related sources, to a book on the subject, to some other means. During the search for the specific thing they were after, they would also learn about: the general historical context of that period, other related verses, events of a similar nature throughout history, cultural peculiarities, linguistical differences, etc.
On the other hand, if "fact checking" is simply a thing done on a persons behalf, not only is the accuracy of the check a concern, but the act will not encourage learning about that related context. The recipient will not have a reason to learn of those other things, and might never learn or maintain that valuable skill of research and verification.
I feel "fact checking" as first pioneered by politifact (if you don't count snopes) was a significant advance in journalism and I recall they did hold a substantial number of left wing journalists and talking heads to account, bias or not. The biggest change was that journalism traditionally expected you to trust the veracity of a story based on a journalists reputation. After journalists reputations largely got smashed by the Iraq War, I really appreciated Politifact's commitment to at least stating what their sources of information actually were. It felt like a more transparent form of journalism you could "Fact check" yourself. The articles WERE still fundamentally subjective opinion pieces, but they were at least based on sources you could actually look up yourself, and often with these fact check articles I treat them like wikipedia use them as an index of sources.
I'm not against fact-checking persay, I'm more against the artificial promotion of certain parties influence through forced editorialisation. I feel birdwatch holds the promise of a better way to accomplish the same end.
I think there is nothing wrong with fact checking the problem is that the fact checking that is being done often has a bias. One example that comes to mind was the Hunter Biden laptop that was dismissed as Russian propaganda by the fact checks. Turned out it was completely true.
Some items found on it were certainly his. How many lawyers would care to go into court with a piece of evidence having a chain of custody like that laptop's?
Depends on what you mean by “completely true.” For instance, I heard all kinds of wild/absurd accusations like he had child porn all over it. If that were “completely true,” he’d be in cuffs. You need to give more context here.
Sure, let me be clearer. The media said the laptop and the videos were Russian misinformation. Turns out that was his laptop and that was him in those videos.
I'm going to be honest, this doesn't clear up much at all. What videos are you talking about? And when did Hunter et al say his laptop literally didn't exist?
What was disputed was what the repair tech said he found on it, as well as the fake news/gossip Hannity and co kept repeating without any evidence. Remember when a courier "lost" the supposedly incredibly damning and totally-proves-something-about-Hunter evidence en route to Hannity that they conveniently had no copies or backups of any kind? We still don’t even know what they allegedly contained!
Russian accounts absolutely amplified and generated misinformation around Hunter Biden in an attempt to hurt Joe Biden's election chances. They have consistently engaged in this behavior during our elections. There is a consensus among our intelligence organizations, it's old news.
Please present concrete claims and proof if you're going to say something is "completely true."
The videos of him smoking crack and negotiating with prostitutes in Ukraine.
>when did Hunter Biden deny the laptop
Joe Biden went on stage to debate Donald Trump where he publicly said that the laptop was “Russian disinformation”. Hunter Biden didn’t really deny it though he said he “wasn’t sure if it was his”.
Twitter refused to post the NY post story as well as banned users mentioning the Hunter Biden laptop scandal.
Obviously, this was a cover up. The laptop was his.
Sounds like you should have no issue sharing these alleged videos or at least proof of their existence. Or any of your sources. I’m also not sure why Hunter’s well-documented and acknowledged addiction is such a fixation for the right.
I’m done man. Have a good one. I’ll gladly read any sources you send along.
This is not a left or right issue. It’s the media and big tech covering up the facts that’s an issue. Sounds to me like you have a bias.
>videos don’t exist
Wait, do you seriously think these videos are fake? They were all over Reddit.
I can send you the link. I can’t post it here since it has nudity but I’m more then happy to send it to you. Is there an email or way you would like to receive these vids? (MP4 files).
Although I think that most fact checking is biased, I am less concerned of bias, as long as people have a means and an ability to determine the truth of the thing. My concern then isn't with where bias exists, or in what direction, but instead with what the effect of fact checking results in. I think it would probably be a healthier outcome for truth learning if a "fact checker", whether it be a person or a machine, would instead point the user to instructions of how to research "For the field of (whatever) you will want to consult (this) area of research.", rather than "According to XYZ, (some person) said it's (that)."
Like, if I wanted to learn about something regarding the financial affairs of Europe in the 1300s, someone could just link me a quote that Professor so-and-so said something. But what if that professor is generally seen as a quack in that field? What if, after making that statement, he corrected himself a week later? What if that quote is simply decades old, and new information has come to light since then? What if my interest was specifically in one area of Europe, but his statement encompassed multiple countries, and parts of the Middle East? What if the statement being made had an assumption of "excluding other factors regarding wars A, B, C and plagues, 1, 2, 3" but was not in the quote that I was given?
These are all things that one might accidentally pick up and learn about during exploration of the truth, but be completely unaware of needing to know that when they first started.
To give a real world example of what I mean, consider this: A prominent New Testament scholar is Dr. Bart D Ehrman. In most debates I have seen posted on YouTube regarding whether The Bible is a trustworthy source will reference Dr. Ehrman at some time or another, by those in favor of Christianity and scriptural accuracy. The thing is, Dr. Ehrman is an strong opponent of Christianity and outspoken Atheist. Dr. Ehrman is a very big name in the field, and has a lot of criticisms against The Bible itself, but he also strongly affirms historical proof of Jesus' existence, life, and death - he's written at least one book on the matter[1]. If someone were to simply see the quote he has made, "but he did exist, whether we like it or not." the immediate assumption about his stance and belief is that he's a Christian, and therefore biased.
It's the loss of this context, this underlying breadth that I'm concerned with. That fact checking, in a very real sense, removes both the onus and need to read and determine for ones own self. That fact checking does too much, and gives too little; the worst of both. A fact without the background, a cause without explanation.
At that point in time as Sadam had just used WMDs against the Kurds and many observes thought it likely he had not all of a sudden stopped having them. That no one found any WMDs later on does not make reporting what intelligence agencies said at the time “lying”. Do you have any information that the Washington Post was reporting something they knew to be untrue _at the time_?
At the time it was very reasonable to assume Saddam had (more) WMDs. Stating otherwise is suffering from hindsight bias, there is really no reason to assume malice here.
That's just not true. The "source" for US intelligence was called Curveball and the information came from Germany. The German intelligence service, BND, warned the US multiple times that the information was made up. Even the CIA's head of the European division Tyler Drumheller said that he warned George Tenet that the information was unreliable[2]. Tyler Drumheller also said that "everyone in the chain of command knew exactly what was happening"[3].
The informant was called:
- "crazy … out of control" (by German Intelligence)
- "congenital liar" (by Friends)
- "an alcoholic" (by US physician) [4]
UN weapons inspectors said at the time that the US is deliberately ignoring their information.
They KNEW for a fact that the information was false. It's not like they then found out that the information was bogus and that hindsight is 20/20 or something. It was known at the time.
It was also public knowledge in countries like Germany. Do you really think The Washington Post and other outlets don't check what the Germans had to say about all of this considering the information came from Germany? Not suspicious that the country where the information supposedly comes from doesn't want to support the war at all? Nope. The Washington Post and others didn't care. They wanted that war and supported it.
That's one source of information about WDMs being false, and that may indeed have been knowable at that time. But lack of proof does not prove the opposite, it does not prove that Saddam did not have WDMs.
Saddam had used WDMs on multiple occasions in the past and it was not unreasonable to think he would use them again, even without any proof he had any more. It's not all that hard to hide those weapons if you are a dictator. The US made the mistake of presenting this incorrect piece of information. But reporting reasonable sounding information from an intelligence agency, even if that later turns out to be false, does not make the Washington Post a "liar" or a "state mouthpiece", as the grand parent claimed.
> But reporting reasonable sounding information from an intelligence agency, even if that later turns out to be false, does not make the Washington Post a "liar" or a "state mouthpiece", as the grand parent claimed.
Sure sounds like being a state mouthpiece to me. That's kind of what uncritically echoing what a murderous government tells you, while refusing to give the time of day to anti-war voices like a good little lapdog is.
In regards to them being liars - kust read their reporting from the time, such as this article titled "Irrefutable"
"AFTER SECRETARY OF STATE Colin L. Powell's presentation to the United Nations Security Council yesterday, it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction. Mr. Powell left no room to argue seriously that Iraq has accepted the Security Council's offer of a "final opportunity" to disarm."
This reporting they did was a lie that helped sell a war under false pretences.
It wasn't UNREASONABLE but I wouldn't say it was VERY reasonable. At the time a number of traditional US allies did refuse to (openly) participate in the "Coalition of the willing". I think if you got your news from non-American and non-British sources at the time, I think there was far more uncertainty and doubt that Saddam had such weapons. I have heard this line before "Everybody at the time thought it" but I genuinely saw most people around me calling bullshit. There was a big sense of a grasping of straws from US intelligence, such as aluminium tubes being great evidence of nuclear development, and "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud".
In fact it was remarkable just how much more bias the American media was then the global media at the time, and it doesn't seem to me like the American media had any special reason to be more confident that Saddam was nuclear than any of the media in the rest of the world. My theory wasn't that American mainstream media outlets like WaPo and NYT were going out of their way to start a war under false pretences, it was more that they had a lot of incentives to be bias in a pro-war direction.
I live in Europe so I did get my news from non-US media sources. There were a lot of reasons not to go to war, especially in the way the US did. There was no UN backing yet and there was no good plan what to do with the country once Saddam was gone. But claiming you knew that Saddam had all of a sudden given up all his WDMs doesn't seem like a very strong one. This man violated countless UN resolutions about WDMs in the past, and now he all of sudden went straight? How is that a reasonable assumption? Also, it's not impossible he did have them after all and just hid them well.
Yes. As in I'm looking at the screen reading a tweet, and it vanishes in some animated fashion with me not doing anything. It's not gone, but I have to know how to find it to see it again.
A lot of apps (I don't really use Twitter, but assume this of it) do this thing where you're at a page/view you'd like to return to later, so when you actually do return later (either by switching between apps or unlocking your device) then all the content you wanted to continue is right there as expected, ready to go, then the app unexpectedly triggers an unwanted refresh animation then takes you to the homepage or if not that, it could be impossible or unclear how to get back to what you were just doing/reading. Firefox for android doesn't do this, nextdoor does.
What I'm seeing is individual tweets disappearing while looking at my feed. And it's animated + 144hz monitor so I can see them fly away into the either. Sometimes while reading them and about to click on them. And then I can't. It's really annoying.
Yeah, it's a common complaint, seen it on HN and Twitter quite a few times. In fact, there was recently a joke tweet with 95k likes about it:
>Twitter laid me off today. If you know of any open positions for project managers and senior software engineers, let me know. I was the PM in charge of that feature that shows you a good tweet before the whole timeline refreshes so you can't find it
>They are written and rated by users, and the notes are only added as context to Tweets if they are rated highly enough by multiple raters who have tended to disagree in the past.
Interesting, I remember someone on /r/slatestarcodex having the idea to rate/sort reddit comments by that metric, which I dub "sort by should-be-uncontroversial" (because normally-disagreeing people all think it's correct).
(Then again, it almost might incentivize politician-style vacuous/feel-good statements.)
Each US presidential administration I've been under has always cited cherry-picked, sound-bite US statistics -- and has the gall to take credit for them. It's like someone's constantly watching the metrics, and every positive blip becomes a candidate for being a talking point.
They take cruel advantage of how opaque the connections are between the macroeconomic, political, and social inputs, and the outputs as experienced by individuals.
Even worse, talking points like that prime people to expect the government to be constantly manipulating variables in the economy, which causes inefficiency and necessarily leads to more unelected officials running more of the country -- since constant manipulation is inaccessible to legislators.
Of course the administration uses cherry-picked statistics to get credit. And of course the opponents of the administration use cherry-picked statistics to criticize the administration.
Beyond obvious short-term political goals, the reason for this is simple: in a machine as large and complicated as the government, it's really really hard to accurately ascribe meaningful credit (or guilt) for any change, and especially to do so in a way that is understandable by voters.
Each administration makes changes (positive and negative) that won't be felt by voters for decades, if at all; and under each administration, voters endure the consequences (positive and negative) of previous administrations. But that doesn't get people to the polls, so why talk about it.
> it's really really hard to accurately ascribe meaningful credit (or guilt) for any change
It's a bitter pill to swallow that I not only have to give these people my money to do this work, but they're wasting time trying to ascribe credit or blame for it.
> and especially to do so in a way that is understandable by voters.
This is the old "voters are actually stupid" idea. I don't buy it. Voters seem to have no problem deciding for themselves who deserves what credit, what politicians want is to market their "success" and to pass off their "failure."
Again.. using our own funds to do it. I find the whole thing inappropriate. If we decide to credit you, you will be re-elected, if we decide to blame you, we will invoke the courts.. and I doubt they will have a "really really hard time ascribing guilt" to the appropriate party.
> This is the old "voters are actually stupid" idea. I don't buy it. Voters seem to have no problem deciding for themselves who deserves what credit, what politicians want is to market their "success" and to pass off their "failure."
It's been studied and is kinda true. You can pretty reliably do something like, over a controversial tax hike that affected 2% of the population, get 30% of respondents to claim it made their taxes go up, if there was a heavy media push about how it'd make everyone's taxes go up, and that's for something they should have direct experience with. You can also do things like get an amusingly-high percentage of people who oppose various social programs by name to tell you they'd support a law to replace them with some other program you describe... that's identical to what the program already does. Then there's all the people who tell you how much more dangerous America is now than when they were growing up in the 1960s or 70s.
I dunno about dumb, but voters' views are rather less connected to reality than one might hope, and seem to have a whole lot more to do with what they're being told by pundits.
Emotions, rather than logic. Irrespective of party, for a sadly large portion of voters. Not everyone in every party, maybe more in some parties than others (I don't have any data for that, this is just a theory / supposition); but even for whatever party you the reader is most aligned with, there will be some who blindly follow that party and do not think for themselves.
While I agree with you, I think it is easy to think of ourselves as “we are not the ones that are emotional, we think logically”. But the thing is, human beings are just emotional to the core and every sensory input is sensed as per the actual emotional state we are in, biased towards our inherent biases.
Party alignment has unfortunately devolved into this “us vs them” pack mentality, and at this point I honestly question the point of parties at all. Why don’t we instead vote on individuals only, and make parties straight up illegal?
Ostensibly the parties are choosing select people through a strict vetting process. I think informing yourself about individuals would be much more difficult than picking a party with a long, presumably representative history.
There's also a considerable barrier to entry. Louis Rossmann had Larry Sharpe on, who had an interesting talking points in the first three minutes:
I think the key point is that the media wouldn't cover him if he didn't buy ads, and the cost of a poll stood at $40,000. How far can you campaign on a shoestring budget? It's a little easier when you can pool resources through an institution or a party while also gaining the immense benefit of a much more robust network of connections.
Those are some of the infrastructural barriers we've got to overcome, and I can't imagine that movement in that direction would go uncontested. It's quite the uphill battle.
You might give Neil Postman's "How to Watch the TV News" a shot. He had some very prescient points regarding media and how it has transformed politics. Chomsky also has some interesting points on partisan politics.
But yeah, I totally agree, it just seems like very narrow minded allegiance. I think in the US it has a lot to do with conflicting interests of people in high-density places and the rural. I've got a population map overlayed on election results right now, and the data seems to fit that conclusion.
"We" are all held, arbitrarily, in the same group, which is... Absurd. It's like a hostage situation and it seems nobody has recognized that we're being held involuntarily.
The US heavily values the protection of speech. I think political speech is among the most deserving of that protection.
“I, candidate for office, align myself to and support the goals of the DNC, GOP, or XYZ” is pretty clearly political speech.
You could nibble away at the edges, maybe eliminate state support for primaries, change funding rules, but I think it’s ultimately not going away and probably not even getting diluted much if we keep the first past the post voting method.
Thinking along, could we perhaps rather vote on things that worry us, instead of people (or sometimes just a color) that may (likely not) do something about it? E.g. salary of teachers, climate change, etc.
And then every law/change has to be derived from that “wishlist”. Because political programs, while originally similar, have been misused greatly. It is still prone to abuse, but perhaps it would increase accountability of politicians and decrease the amount of laws that are only meant to distract the public from something much worse in the background. But surely everyone wants “free beer and immortality” (the program of a joke party where I live), so it would likely fail for other reasons, but a more direct democracy also has the shortcome of.. well, dumb people.
The ballot I filled out a few weeks ago had several such things on it. They are called "ballot measures," or "referenda," and the overall ideology for them is called "Direct Democracy."
Obviously, they are subject to all the typical "push polling" weaknesses, where people can be coaxed into voting a certain way using manipulative wording.
> I dunno about dumb, but voters' views are rather less connected to reality than one might hope.
What voters say is disconnected from reality, because the average voter has average skill at articulating their thoughts and usually only knows how to navigate their own social context. That voter is much more connected to reality than the typical academic, politician or professional though. Because they actually go out and do things in the real world.
You can tell by looking at what the polity does, it is often turns out in hindsight that it is quite an intelligent and practical beast. It is really hard to outdo a democracy when it comes to having a finger on the pulse of what is really going on.
It is a gross unfairness in politics that people so often deal with sound bite caricatures of their opponents rather than being forthright about what motivates their position.
Compare the Chinese response to COVID to democracies like the US. In the US, the COVID pandemic response is basically history. In China, they are still locking places down and you can find videos of people literally fleeing the authorities [0]. This is the difference between a country where official policy is a bit behind the times vs a public that isn't particularly panicked and (correctly) identifies that the threat is minor and they need to get on with life.
> That voter is much more connected to reality than the typical academic, politician or professional though. Because they actually go out and do things in the real world.
I might be off-base here, but I am unsure if you have thought through the ramifications of your statements. What your statement seems to be implicitly saying is that, (a few examples)
- Surgeons who stitch up gunshot wounds in ERs
- Doctors & nurse practitioners who deliver care to communities across the US
- Developers who write the critical code that runs airplanes
- Scientists & engineers who do nanoscale fabrication
- Environmental scientists embedded inside local communities, studying long-term environmental changes
- Developers at Google & DDG writing the code that allows billions of people to do work every day
- Scientists managing the US food supply and researching new ways to protect it,
- Devs at companies like Stripe that power significant parts of the US economy
Your text suggests that all of these people (and the millions more who aren't on the list) are less in tune with "reality" by default as compared to a random plumber or electrician. (I assume that you are referring to working class professions when you say "average voter")
The text also says that they don't "go out and do things in the real world."
It would be deeply wrong to assume that a random plumber or electrician is somehow lesser or incorrect by default. But it's also deeply wrong to say that the people who make important contributions that keep the lights of civilization on aren't somehow connected to reality by default.
Those are roughly the categories of people I was thinking of when I commented. You've put together a list of people who, by and large, are insulated from scarcity - people who either aren't going to have to do without, or are sufficiently confident in their position (academics and poets) that they don't think they need to work a conventional job. Frequently extreme specialists in a specific field that doesn't translate well into broad life experience. They don't have to live their lives in line with the resource constraints that the world works under.
I'm an engineer, I know the perspective well. I'm part of the group of people keeping the lights on. And therefore there is nearly nothing out there that poses any sort of threat to my comfort, because society was built by and for people like me. That isn't an experience that matches up well with the typical experience and it would be very hard to spin as being exposed to 'reality'. I have access to disproportionate resources to solve my problems. And so do all the people you're listing.
I'm having some trouble understanding your perspective. Your original comment said:
> That [average] voter is much more connected to reality than the typical academic, politician or professional though. Because they actually go out and do things in the real world.
Now you're being more specific, saying those people who work outside "the real world," are those who are:
> Frequently extreme specialists in a specific field that doesn't translate well into broad life experience.
Why do you think that a fry cook or janitor has more "broad life experience" than a professor or a doctor? Do you think that there is something more "real" and "authentic" about manual labor, that intellectual labor lacks? Is scarcity the only source of authenticity?
In my experience, most people a born into, and live their entire lives, in a single social stratum. Maybe it's abject poverty, maybe it's menial labor, maybe it's middle-class, or maybe it's educated and professional. The classes live in constant fear and envy of each other, but very few people get to experience more than of them first-hand. There's insulation, as you point out, between the strata, but that doesn't mean that the uneducated and the poor are experiencing more reality, just that they're experiencing it differently.
In this case, what I wanted to say was that politics is deciding what to do next to get the best outcome given a set of constraints. In that context, "real world" to me means the clearest understanding of what the constraints are and what we should do to get the best outcome.
It isn't a question of manual vs. non-manual in my mind. areoform was picking out a list of people who typically aren't exposed to the actual constraints because they are in the top ~10-20% of the social hierarchy, and usually only specialise in one specific area as opposed to understanding the total situation. Someone who has immanent and structural problems putting food on the table or keeping employment will have a much better idea of where the urgent pain points in an economy are than, say, a dev at Stripe.
The people close to the happy tail end of the distribution for comfortable lifestyles aren't going to have a good understanding of the median or hard tail. Some do, most don't. People who live the risk of doing without food have a much better understanding of how bad the current food shortages are than I do, for example. Despite being quite interested in the crisis I have to really go out and look to figure out whether the situation is normal, a little bit worse or immanent threat of large numbers of people who had food last year running out.
Basically, in short, it is easier for someone average to figure out what the experience is for the average person. Which is one of the most important experiences for figuring out whether a policy is working or not. The median voter is quite well connected to the experience of the median voter, much better than people like me who have to use statistics and guess what their experience is.
Thankyou for drawing my attention to the fact that my language was excessively vague.
> You can pretty reliably do something like, over a controversial tax hike that affected 2% of the population, get 30% of respondents to claim it made their taxes go up, if there was a heavy media push about how it'd make everyone's taxes go up, and that's for something they should have direct experience with
I don't think this is necessarily because those voters are stupid. It could be that they oppose the tax, and they will give whatever answer best signals "I oppose this tax", regardless of whether their answer is literally true. This is a reasonable strategy and it makes sense why they'd do it.
> Voters seem to have no problem deciding for themselves who deserves what credit
That is certainly true, but they have a lot of trouble making these kinds of decisions correctly. Much of the time there is an objective fact of the matter regarding the causality between policy and outcome, but discerning it is very hard. In particular, for economic policy the time lag between cause and effect is commonly measured in months or years, and that can be very hard to unwind.
> It's a bitter pill to swallow that I not only have to give these people my money to do this work, but they're wasting time trying to ascribe credit or blame for it.
I agree, it is a bitter pill. The alternative is to live in a society where leaders don't need the goodwill of the people in order to rule, and therefore have no interest in proclaiming their accomplishments. Fortunately, there are lots of dictatorships for you to choose from.
> Voters seem to have no problem deciding for themselves who deserves what credit,
Voters certainly decide, but I see little evidence that they decide accurately. It's not that they're stupid, it's just that (a) they don't understand how the government or the economy work and (b) have no collective memory. So, they decide, if there is inflation under the Biden administration, it must be Biden's fault, QED.
> This is the old "voters are actually stupid" idea.
I don't think that voters are necessarily stupid. They just happen to act stupidly because they treat politics as entertainment rather than their civic duty. If people dedicated their time trying to learn about policy instead of browse memes and articles that affirm their beliefs, we'd be much better off.
Well, unfortunately I do think that voters are stupid. For every smart people you know there is someone on the other side of the IQ distribution and you are just quite likely to be surrounded with a smarter bunch, biasing you towards thinking that the “average” is better than it actually is.
Not the US, but I have read several reports of “vote counters” in Hungary and the amount of people that had to ask which of the options is (surprise) the right-wind, populist Orban is astonishing. And while illiteracy for example may well be worth in Hungary, the general idea is true of every country.
Sure, the average person could be smarter, but there's nothing you can really do about that. The more concerning thing I'm noticing is that some of my peers who are highly rational when it comes to work but are completely irrational when it comes to politics (e.g. treat a heavily editorialized headline as an objective fact).
> And naturally, most have no clue that has to do with women's voting rights, and asking to repeal them.
“Women’s suffrage” is the right of women to vote. “Suffrage” itself is simply who gets the right to vote. “Repeal women’s suffrage” has a very clear meaning, “repeal suffrage” is vague and unclear what is being repealed. Women’s suffrage? Universal male suffrage? (Once upon a time, most men couldn’t vote, since they didn’t meet the property qualifications.) Abolish elections altogether? (Use sortition? Introduce a dictatorship?)
People aren’t stupid to be confused by a confusing question.
Is abolishing elections and replacing them by sortition (legislative juries) “absurd”? A very radical proposal, but doesn’t seem inherently “absurd” to me. And of course, under such a system, nobody has suffrage (unless one means the suffrage of jurors on a jury.)
Voters are vulnerable to trick questions, is basically what I'm reading in this thread, and by this.. we are to judge that they must be _very_ stupid. Yet.. no one offers any evidence that their elected representatives do a better job at passing these same tests.
How anyone puts this down to anything other than a failing of school systems and the mass media in general is somewhat beyond me. It's easier to poke fun of people than dig into the problems in many spheres, I'm sure, but in this one.. I think you're just enabling a specific class of people to slickly pervert the will of the citizenry while still claiming a moral high ground for having done so.
Still not convinced this is anything other than an elitist trick.
This isn't common just in politics, but in your average big corp, even tech. You need to justify your accomplishments today even if the real benefit won't be seen a few months or few years from now.
It would be good to have sane conversations in this country about what we can learn from the past few years (in which I think both this administration and the previous one could be accused of serious blunders and politicking) but pointing fingers is not a helpful contribution.
It would be nice to have a sane conversation. That however is impossible when one side has decided that the other side should be muzzled, viz. every post even remotely critical of democrats getting flagged here, or until recently getting you banned off twitter.
the problem is voters are uneducated, or rather the distribution of education will always be uneven so there will always be undesirable selection effects that every elected politician must definitionally survive
It's pretty wild how the @whitehouse twitter account is used. If you looked at only the ones about the price of gas you'd get the impression its been a great ride.
Are you implying that the whitehouse twitter only got stupid starting in 2021? Granted, that account was not so loud in 2016-2020 as perhaps now (maybe... I haven't counted tweets) because the president of that time was tweeting 10+ times per day (some really unmatched crazy shit too).
Is the point of bringing up Trump to say that he is a bad person who was doing the same thing, therefore that thing is good? Or are we just making lists of people who have lied?
I'm objecting to the parent post starting with 2021 as the year to note that the whitehouse account was posting stupid things. That implies that it was not being stupid prior to 2021, when in contrast the most historically asinine tweets in existence (at least from people in places of high authority) occurred in the 2015-2020 range.
Tweets in general are not good. Most are pointless, many are stupid, some are evil, and sadly only a few are worth existing. So I'm not suggesting that current White House tweets are good. They are just not remarkable in comparison to the tweets from the previous period.
You're welcome to scroll thru https://twitter.com/whitehouse45 if you can stand it. Granted most of it is about every holiday, the decorations for that holiday, the holiday decoration preparations, and the occasional other redecorating courtesy of the First Decorator.
But you definitely can find BS things similar to the one from the social security topic.
"President @realDonaldTrump
has done more to lower medicine prices than any President in history!" (unsurprisingly it's hyperbolic and almost completely lacking any truth or evidence; the evidence points to an opposite result)
I'm not going to dig thru the pile to prove you wrong. But you're wrong.
Edit: Ok, I just have to add this gem.
"This Administration is "tackling longstanding problems that no other Administration had the guts to do," @SeemaCMS
says."
That period was just chock full of useless tweets or outright false tweets.
> "President @realDonaldTrump has done more to lower medicine prices than any President in history!" (unsurprisingly it's hyperbolic and almost completely lacking any truth or evidence; the evidence points to an opposite result)
That is increasing government payments to insulin sellers on for old people using insulin covered by Medicare.
When most people think of “lowering the price of insulin”, they would not think “increasing subsidies to a select group of the country, that happens to vote heavily, and heavily for the administration’s party”.
Also, the insulin price cap was for older, cheaper forms of insulin. The modern ones are still more expensive. Hence, anytime a politician touts doing something about insulin prices without specifying “all insulin”, I assume they are BSing.
Older people are on average more vulnerable, both to disease and increases in the cost of medication. And so what if only certain insulins are made cheaper? They're still cheaper.
It is always possible to spin anything negatively, but it might be worth considering why you're putting in this much effort.
Because pitting certain tribes of constituents against each other is a big problem in US politics, works against efforts to redistribute wealth for all. Now that the old voters have their healthcare, they have less incentive to vote for plans for others to get it.
Most importantly, it avoids politicians having to address the root problem, which is the lack of taxpayer funded R&D into medicine that would be in the public domain, hence not subject to the high prices of patented medicine. And of course, this helps the businesses that patent medicines.
It is also ridiculous to me how much more my country prioritizes the elderly over children, who are literally the future.
> Because pitting certain tribes of constituents against each other is a big problem in US politics
Doing things for some groups is not the same as pitting groups against each other.
> works against efforts to redistribute wealth for all
You can only steal and reallocate money, not wealth. This will destroy wealth for all.
> the lack of taxpayer funded R&D into medicine that would be in the public domain, hence not subject to the high prices of patented medicine.
Plenty of R&D is at least partially taxpayer funded, but you're underestimating the total amount of R&D (including the cost of completely failed ideas) that goes into drug discovery. Deciding taxpayers should fund the sum total of pharma R&D, and presumably also the production costs, as those would've been funded by the patent-protected profits, seems strange on the face of it.
> how much more my country prioritizes the elderly over children
The elderly aren't always prioritised. But with health, they, along with newborns and pregnant mums, are some of the naturally most at-risk people in your population.
The same way he controls his press officers, who are constantly retracting his statements and retroactively editing out his "gaffes"? I'm highly doubtful.
I believe the point is that, yes what biden did here is bad, but what trump did regularly was significantly worse (especially calling into question the 2020 election)
It is the new Chewbacca defence [1], whenever the discussion deviates from the desired narrative it is enough to bring on a variation on 'but Trump did XXX' or 'at least it was not as bad as Trump' or 'just like Trump' to derail it.
Now that the precedent has been set this is likely to continue with one side using the mentioned but Trump arguments which are countered with at least he was not as bad as Biden. Rinse, repeat, ad infinitum et delirium.
>It's like someone's constantly watching the metrics, and every positive blip becomes a candidate for being a talking point.
I would add "or negative", and I wouldn't qualify it with "it's like". As far as I can tell, this is the one-sentence description of how the public face of politics works, everywhere, always.
It's not 'cruel' for any administration to indicate basic realities without some arbitrary historical and legal context.
While we should be eternally vigilant and skeptical, the lack of very specific context in this case is nowhere near a blatant manipulation.
In fact, I would say the 'problem' is maybe the opposite - I am somewhat more skeptical that this is a 'Musk led personal intervention' to draw arbitrary cynicism towards a political entity he does not like - playing 'moral equivalence' games with people who say "The economy is doing good!" (without nuanced context) and "I won the election!" (without the obvious 'context' that the statement is literally false, or blatantly misleading).
That said, it's just skepticism, I really can't say one way or the other obviously.
There's clearly a grey threshold in what we can tolerate from government and political statements, and it's very hard to fathom where that line is - but this one is not near that line.
If any administration wants to claim "Lowest unemployment ever!" in a Tweet, well then that's fine. They can say that as long as it's true, a history lesson is not needed in this case.
In any case, if they are going to do this, they need a set of publicly stated criteria for it, and they need to apply the criteria objectively and consistently.
You really are having a hard time with the words 'cruel' and 'harm'.
The WH statements are not misleading, and they definitely do not cause 'harm'.
You're using the language of post-modern/post-reality hyperbole politics which frankly, might be our greatest scourge at the moment.
When Donald Trump Tweeted that "The US had the lowest unemployment rate for African Americans" during his tenure, one could argue that's a bit of a stretch in terms of him taking credit.
The press had a lot to say about it.
But it's fully within his purview to say that even if it really does require contextualization.
There's no need to 'fix' a Tweet or statement like that.
When people say things like 'XYZ cures cancer!' - or 'XYZ politician is secretly abusing children in the basement of a restaurant' - then there's a moderation issue.
I too strongly disagree with modern political winds and the postmodern moral and social philosophy, but that doesn't have to mean that kindness and not doing harm aren't important or have no meaning. They're just one moral dimension among several that are fully valid (if disproportionately emphasized).
It is morally wrong when leaders (Democrat or Republican) intentionally lie in such a way as to manipulate people into beliefs and behaviors that cause more problems for those people.
> But it's fully within his purview to say that even if it really does require contextualization.
Not morally, no it's not. I believe he'll answer for it come judgment day, along with the others who have done it. You've heard the phrase "there are lies, damned lies, and statistics" -- the point is: wrongly framed statistics, intentionally presented, are the worst form of lying.
You may not subscribe to care/harm moral philosophy, but surely you value truth -- it's the bedrock of freedom. To lie is to take away people's freedom.
The Soviet Union, Communist China, and the DPRK were built on lies. Those who tolerate lies do everyone a disservice.
Unless I'm not understanding the article, it seems like the tweet was truthful, the payout is the highest it's been. Is that entirely due to Biden, less clear. Could also be just adjusting to inflation, also true. But how many things are not adjusted to inflation, so even if the only reason the payout is highest is because of inflation, well at least they are making it match and not ignoring it like a million other things. There are no lies here, only things which might be hard to attribute. And I think it's reasonable to attribute this to Biden in all but the most narrow of interpretations.
For anyone else that didn't read the first paragraph of the article, here it is:
> The White House deleted a Twitter post on Wednesday touting an increase in Social Security benefits for seniors after the social media platform added a “context” note pointing out that the increase was tied to a 1972 law requiring automatic increases based on cost of living changes.
This is a different kind of statement when it's not hedged in any way as compared to the tweet as quoted in the article.
> “Seniors are getting the biggest increase in their Social Security checks in 10 years through President Biden’s leadership” (emphasis mine)
Of course it's easy to assume that they said "the biggest increase" to make it sound as good as possible and it's easy to assume that they said "in 10 years" because they didn't want to just lie. But then, why did they need to include "through President Biden's leadership"? Isn't that technically false if it happened "through 50-year-old legislation"?
That being said, why do you think that statement isn't intentionally misleading? Or if you do think it's intentionally misleading, why do you think the context shouldn't be added? I don't buy that it's arbitrary; it's clearly relevant to the statement that was made.
Certainly I'd agree that this policy is absolutely ripe for abuse (through arbitrary application) but so far I haven't seen a reason for people to think that it will be or has been abused, barring the assumptions they choose to make.
The statement "Lowest unemployment ever!" is definitely 'hedged' in the same manner as this Tweet about benefits.
Taking credit for the 'lowest employment' especially using the term 'ever' would require an hour of debatable qualifications to make it entirely clear.
Would the President make this statement in his 1st month in office, make this a bit of a nonrepresentational statement? Well, probably. But it's still true.
This understanding that somehow this specific WH statement is hedged or loaded in some kind of special manner just isn't correct. In fact, you could likely delve a bit deeper into it as well to find even more relevant nuance.
"Why do you think that statement isn't intentionally misleading?"
It's true, and it doesn't require any more context than any other statement, so it's fine.
I think it would be naive of us to expect that the statement by the WH or any political body is going to run us down on the details and caveats of their statements unless they are hugely relevant.
Some of the language used here that this causes 'cruelty and harm' etc. is ridiculous.
This language within the scope of normal communications enough that we would not even be having this discussion were Twitter to not have initially marked the Tweet.
The so called 'cruelty and harm' would have gone entirely unnoticed.
And finally, this is not a threshold of content moderation for arbitrary 3rd parties to make arbitrary corrections. I'd love a feature that allowed me to add my favourite 'truthy-meter' to Twitter statements, but I'd loathe to trust Twitter specifically for things that are so mundane. They have a responsibility to call out hard misinformation, such as vaccine or election lies - but not arbitrary quips.
I have mixed feelings about this comment. I can't bring myself to disagree with your premises, but I strongly disagree with the conclusion.
> I think it would be naive of us to expect that the statement by the WH or any political body is going to run us down on the details and caveats of their statements unless they are hugely relevant.
> Some of the language used here that this causes 'cruelty and harm' etc. is ridiculous.
> This language within the scope of normal communications enough that we would not even be having this discussion were Twitter to not have initially marked the Tweet.
> The so called 'cruelty and harm' would have gone entirely unnoticed.
I won't disagree but that's because of what "naive" means. It reads that I should expect this kind of behavior, to which I would say I shouldn't tolerate it. I should be able to expect that these political bodies don't produce this kind of statement.
I do think the "cruelty and harm" would have gone unnoticed because it's so common to see this kind of thing. There are people that won't look into this and will have their vote swayed because of it, despite that it doesn't matter. I don't care that it's true when it's so misleading and I don't think it should be tolerated. I do not think it's hyperbole to use this language, disagreements notwithstanding.
I don't remember what it is but I remember hearing a word for this kind of statement. Specifically in public relations, it's a statement that's true on its face and clearly intended to sound good in a particular way, but also missing key context that takes away from the good.
Anyway, often in such cases I will read the context in some public comment section, rather than having it pinned by the staff of the site I'm reading. I can understand that people do not like that this was decided by Twitter staff (and I do honestly expect that's what happened given the account's profile), and I would also prefer that this sort of thing is decided by the community or even not at all.
But I have to end in defense of "cruelty and harm". You can disagree but it would be naive to think it is simply mistaken thinking.
Your comments make a lot of sense were there material indirection about some material issue, but there isn't.
So in this case none of it really applies; notions 'cruelty and harm' are a bit absurd.
There is a habit among 'thinking people' to escalate the most innocuous thing to an undeserved proportion.
When there are no lingering controversies, the most minor supposed slight - becomes the controversy.
This issue is out of proportion for this level of meaningful dissection.
More objectively ... the Tweet does not involve policy, it's not political, it's not controversial, it's not 'before the courts', it does not involve foreign policy, it's not 'insensitive or offensive', it doesn't delve into economic matters, it's not related to health or elections, it won't move markets or affect business - and most appropriately - it's essentially factual.
It's a banal, truthful statement about some secondary, bureaucratic outcome.
If we were to apply this level of conscientious scrutiny to every Tweet or statement, I don't think anyone would ever agree on what 'reality' is.
So there is no 'there' there. There's nothing to escalate.
We have a free press to add more context, that's their job.
Tweets can cause 'harm' obviously, when influential people lie about material things especially related to health, violence, ultra bigotry/racism, political insurrection etc. but otherwise, Twitter is a random tech company, it's beyond their purview to selectively contextualize arbitrary bits of information.
> the lack of very specific context in this case is nowhere near a blatant manipulation
I disagree. First of all the increase wasn't Biden's administration merit and that's one blatant lie.
Then if the social security benefits have increased only to keep up with inflation, to celebrate this as positive is clearly misinformation. Those receiving the benefits are as poor as they were before, while society as a whole becomes poorer. Nothing to celebrate here.
My question then is, would/will the same fact-checking apply to a different government that Musk does support? He’s been pushing for this equal fact checking and equal platform for both parties, but as far as I can tell we’re not seeing these banners anywhere on politics Twitter besides official government accounts.
Yeah, it's ironic that their claiming responsibility for "inflation-based increase" in social security is correct -- because of their loose monetary policy that caused massive inflation.
Monetary policy is the setting of interest rates by the central bank. Fiscal policy is taxing and spending. Monetary policy has been more or less zero since the GFC.
Not really: inflation is happening all over the world, not just in the US. In fact, the US has some of the lowest inflation among western nations.
The cause of inflation is the economic hit from Covid and our response to it. So my original point stands: the world is complicated, and it's naive to say "Biden caused inflation."
Loose monetary policy is what enabled the US to respond to COVID in the manner it decided to. I don’t think you’re being charitable to the poster you’re replying to when you say “it’s complicated” then place much of the blame on the very factor said poster identified.
But the bulk of the response to COVID (what hackyhacky is arguing) did not happen under the current administration, so wouldn't be due to their policies (what TimTheTinker is arguing).
> Loose monetary policy is what enabled the US to respond to COVID in the manner it decided to.
This still fails to explain why the US is seeing lower inflation than most of the rest of the world, almost none of which has the borrowing capacity of the US federal government.
The US is the world reserve currency, so in uncertain times investors in foreign countries buy dollars. This is the only reason why the US is not currently seeing inflation rates of 20 or 30% per year.
The rest of the world is not uniformly seeing inflation. I heard this morning that Canada is at 3.5%. Korea is at 6%, and this is driven by import prices, since the USD is at high demand.
Domestically to the US, it's more complicated. Boomers are retiring causing a labor crunch, but businesses are attaining record profits which just about match the magnitude of price increases.
The majority of Covid debt originated prior to January 20th 2021, and with a GOP majority in the Senate. Of the $1400 stimulus sent to individuals, the previous President, the previous Senate Majority Leader, and the 2 incumbent Senate candidates (that didn't win) each campaigned on the equivalent of the $1400. The previous administration is also on record as rejecting audit measures for the Payment Protection Program. The previous administration nominated the fed chairman that increased the federal reserve balance sheet and tools well beyond 2008-2009, while also not adjusting the pace despite the federal stimulus above (and other stimulus until Fall 2021)
Monetary policy is the setting of interest rates by the central bank. Fiscal policy is taxing and spending. Monetary policy has been more or less zero since the GFC.
From what I can tell, the US had the highest inflation in the G7 until the Fed started hiking interest rates more aggressively than the rest of the world to get it under control. This was particularly noticable to me since once they did the UK became the G7 member with the highest inflation and our media started pointing at that as proof of our government's economic incompetence in a way that the US media very obviously had not.
Yes - the Fed is (for better or worse) more independent and agile than the ECB. Being responsive to only a single nation’s government (even when you’re the global reserve currency) has its perks.
> They take cruel advantage of how opaque the connections are between the macroeconomic, political, and social inputs, and the outputs as experienced by individuals.
That's why the more transparency and readily-available information there is, the better : )
First, think about the people who work in your marketing department. Now think about them with the reach to influence the entire world. That's politics, and it's terrifying.
"In the fall of 1972, President Nixon announced that the rate of increase of inflation was decreasing. This was the first time a sitting president used the third derivative to advance his case for reelection." - Hugo Rossi
> President Nixon announced that the rate of increase of inflation was decreasing. This was the first time a sitting president used the third derivative to advance his case for reelection.
I can't think of a more fitting jerk.
(though arguably Nixon was actually talking about a fourth derivative (of price)...)
- price is 0th derivative
- inflation is 1st derivative (change in average price)
- rate of increase in inflation is 2nd derivative
- that rate of increase is decreasing — 3rd derivative
So I think Nixon is talking about a negative 3rd derivative of price. Am I missing one?
In my country we have a lowered VAT under certain circumstances. We had a new government tell us they were "reducing the VAT discount to half", just to avoid the word "raise", since they had promised that no taxes would be raised. I was reminded of that quote then -- in this case they were using the multiplication of two negatives rule.
When? He bragged in July when the MoM rate was zero and the YoY rate fell by half a percent. I can't find him bragging anywhere that the rate is holding steady though.
Can't tell if he's trying to say that it only went up a little in September ("was 8.2 before"), but if he is then he's wrong - the YoY rate has come down every month since July.[1] So we still haven't passed the second derivative (which he did brag about in January apparently).
The MoM rate (the amount prices increased in July) was zero (down from 1.3% in June), not -0.5%, meaning that prices stayed the same. If it had been -0.5%, that would have meant prices decreased in July by half a percent. The YoY rate is what fell by 0.6% (not 0.5% like I thought), meaning that prices had risen a total of 8.5% since July 2021, a decrease from 9.1% in June (vs. June 2021).
>0.9% in October, 0.8% in November and 0.5% in December, according to the Labor Department.
Definitely similarly tone deaf, but in this case he was bragging about the second derivative, not the third - prices continued to increase, but the rate of increase (inflation) was indeed falling.
Errmm? He says “we are making progress in slowing the rate of price increases”.
(making progress in (slowing the (rate of price increases)))
3 ————————— 2 ————— 1 ———————————
The question is what you think “progress” is doing in that sentence. Slowing the rate => 2nd deriv is decreasing but progress, to me, implies that third deriv is what is being pointed at. 2nd deriv would be “we are slowing” to me.
I’m not sure what inflation number you’re looking at, but CPI for Oct/Nov/Dec of 2021 was: 6.2%, 6.8%, 7%
Rate of increase in prices = inflation = first derivative of prices. Slowing the rate of increase in prices = lowering inflation = second derivative. I wouldn't interprete 'making progress in lowering the rate of increase' as 'lowering the rate of increase of the rate of increase' which is basically how you'd have to read that to get to the third derivative. As the article points out, Biden was talking about MoM inflation, I quoted the numbers there for those months. They're in the article.
Inflation is the first derivative. The rate of increase of inflation is the 2nd derivative. The idea that the rate of increase of deflation is itself decreasing would then be the 3rd derivative (think "the rate of the rate of increase of inflation is negative")
I'm way more in favor a of a system that employs the userbase to "fact check" than whatever busybody connected to a partisan "fact checker" at twitter doing it manually and adding their own particular bias.
Why do you think the userbase would be superior? Twitter, like most social media platforms, prioritizes controversy. Pot-stirrers are the ones who get amplified. Why should we trust an incredibly polarized userbase to somehow lack bias?
By design, Birdwatch appears designed to reward people who consistently provide notes that are neutral, factual, and offer relevant citations. It is designed not to be a popularity context where popular notes bubble to the top.
I'm sure that there will be ways to game it. But it does not appear to be being gamed at the moment.
Somehow Wikipedia made it work. Seems like a similar effort could work here, of course with the additional challenge of being more-realtime. It may be a different goal than the other parts of Twitter content, but that doesn't make it impossible.
Wikipedia doesn't have a clearly politically motivated, unpredictable leader - who didn't even want to own it/run it in the first place - at the helm of a for-profit platform, who is using said platform to wage a culture war.
Their editor culture is also pretty disciplined. I don’t think we have any reason to believe Twitter users are up to the task.
It's less that I trust the rabble, and more that I see the rabble as the lesser evil to the horrifying status quo of having war criminals like the Washington Post fact check claims on the Russo-Ukraine war because they're an "Authority" and a "paper of record" and "non-partisan" and "just checking facts".
I am strongly in favor of giving birdwatch a chance and maybe making a few adjustments along the way because we need something better than hack journalists and something more than wikipedia articles.
If you're trying to find faults with a claim, then using one of those extremes seems completely appropriate. They will be the only ones motivated to do so.
But they aren't going to tell the truth. Republicans don't respond to Biden's policies with sober recitations of well-sourced factual criticism, but the kind of paranoid partisan hyperbole you'd find on Fox News, because their goal isn't truth but keeping and maintaining power in an age where voters primarily react on emotion, not logic and reason, within bubbles of manufactured hyper-reality. Misinformation from one side doesn't just cancel out misinformation from the other.
Birdwatch is designed to add context with which both extremes agree. The quoted watches are reasoned, and cite sources. Actually more informative than 99% of Twitter.
The change seems to be that it has now rolled out on all accounts rather than just Red accounts, and now there is drama.
> The change seems to be that it has now rolled out on all accounts rather than just Red accounts, and now there is drama.
What do you mean by this? There was one high profile incident with the white house, but I am struggling to believe that’s when the controversy started.
> All we know for sure is last week there were notable embarrassing contextualizations of right-wing propaganda, and no notable embarrassing contextualizations of left-wing propaganda. Now, there are many examples.
I was citing the highest profile, very recent incident. The one that got greater attention. I’m sure there have been other times Democrats have made statements that have been fact checked and found false, which is a good thing to do.
Still not sure where you’re getting this idea that there is suddenly an outcry because people across the aisle are just now being fact checked. Do you have any data on how often it was only Republicans vs. Democrats and how that shifted? Do you have any data on whether or not there’s been an uptick in bad information posted by Democrats? I just think you’re missing a lot of critical context here and your inferences are not really earned.
Because it's not sourced from "authority". Because the authorities are just as polarized as the userbase, but have power they didn't earn, and are rarely held accountable. Or at least they used to be on twitter.
Twitter's staff leanings (at least previously) aren't a secret: https://files.catbox.moe/3mvjhv.jpg With the userbase being the "fact checkers" there's at least a chance of balance, if not unbiased research. With their pre-Musk staff there was approximately a 1.3% chance of balance if political donations are any measure.
We'll see once changes are made to the platform itself.
To be clear, I'm more anti-authoritarian than a fan of either big party. If twitter's employees were 97% Republican donating I'd be saying the exact same thing.
> We'll see once changes are made to the platform itself.
Assuming we see anything of substance beyond his chest pounding about it and some loud firings. He explicitly said yesterday that he has not changed twitter’s content moderation policies to help advertisers feel better. Which isn’t surprising at all. The dude is outrageous and full of hot air, but he isn’t stupid. He knows that Twitter can’t function if there isn’t some moderation in place, and he knows it was a long road to get where they are now.
He can nitpick all he wants, but I am willing to gamble that 99% of the current policies will be in place a year from now and nothing substantive will change, which he’ll try to mask with a few more high profile stunts or proclamations.
The problem is that special knowledge is also prone to bias.
Some correct, but unpopular expert opinion can be also voted to be wrong, when the level of required knowledge is substantially high.
I think the point at which "popular but wrong" starts winning out is way lower than you think are implying it is when you're talking about internet cesspools that have a cross section of the general public (Twitter, Reddit, 4Chan, etc).
If you're talking about a forum or somewhere that the casually interested internet riff raff won't dominate the bar moves higher.
That said, I'd rather have internet idiots do group fact checking than have established institutions be in charge of it.
I mean the team being laid off doesn't mean birdwatch won't be used unless it literally just breaks down. Birdwatch is user sourced.
If Elon Musk gets rid of birdwatch I will scream bloody murder because that's probably the best approach I've seen to fact checking since the invention of wikipedia summaries on google search results.
I think there’s a massive difference between correcting something that is untrue, and just deciding you want to have your own say because the truth isn’t representative of what you feel is the broader issue.
Sure, we can say it’s due to an old law passed by republicans. But then the dems can argue that the modern GOP no longer support that… so really this just turns into a mess. Was the fact true? Yes. Was it representative of the broader argument? Depends who to you ask.
I think there are prices of fact check you could’ve put in there - for example nominal vs real terms, but this wasn’t that.
I think if the White House knows that in the days leading up to the mid terms anything they post on Twitter will get a right wing talking point attached to it they’ll quite rightly stop posting at all whether the “context” is true or not.
I'm confused how this was a right wing talking point? In this case it is an actual fact. Are you suggesting we ignore facts if they make the left look bad?
I also want to point out the white house straight up lied and said biden was responsible when he was not (hence the deletion) and you are upset this lie was called out?
Also just an fyi the feature is not something musk added. It was being worked on long before he took over.
Talking points can be facts. In fact they mostly are. I’m saying that Twitter, intervening in the conversation to post a technically true (republican law from decades ago) but misleading context (policy not actually supported by the modern GOP) is bad. Here’s a question: if Trump had been president, would this have happened, given the GOP want to cut social security? Debatable, probably not. So is Biden as president due credit for this rise? Sure. I think you can make a credible case for that.
My point is what you can’t credibly do is present this as a debate between Biden, and Twitter the official arbiter of facts.
Also, the problem with saying this isn’t to do with Musk… Musk owns Twitter. So he owns it. It really doesn’t matter what happened in the past. Today, we’re coming up to the mid terms and Elon Musks company is intervening to push right wing talking points.
> Today, we’re coming up to the mid terms and Elon Musks company is intervening to push right wing talking points.
I don't understand this line of thinking being so certain[0]. Why is it definitely not the case that Elon Musk's company is simply concerned with correcting false[1] statements made by the official White House account?
You're seemingly trying to imply that this decision was made solely because of right-wing bias from Elon Musk's company and I don't see why that connection would be made without prior (ostensibly left-wing) bias.
(I don't exactly want to make this point because I don't think it necessarily matters but these context blurbs are seemingly often added by community members rather than Twitter staff.
Given how high-profile the official White House account is, it's likely this decision was made by Twitter staff, which is part of why I don't think this point matters.)
[0] People are entitled to their opinions but it doesn't make sense to me that I would know that this was totally only done for a single reason which I don't like.
[1] I think you make a strong argument that the statement is not necessarily false, but certainly that argument has counter points. The statement given by the White House did not attempt to argue in any way your point. Indeed, no mention of what Trump would have done had he been in office at this time. I have to say it's very reasonable to think that the statement made was plainly false.
You're denigrating the law requiring social security benefits to increase with inflation as a "republican law." Then you suggest the republicans now want to pass a law with the opposite effect?
I'm not denigrating it, I'm saying attributing this years rise to a republican from 50 years ago when the republicans who ran in 2020 have largely voiced opposition to it, is at best misleading - since if the GOP had won in 2020 it's perfectly likely this rise wouldn't have happened.
I think I see what your saying but I disagree. Before Musk twitter was heavily pushing left wing talking points. They would ban right wing people for threats yet let left wing people make death threats all day long. There so called arbiter of facts was massively politically bias. Jack at one point even said conservatives “don’t feel safe to express their opinions” in the company. Pretty hard to argue with that kind of statement.
So my question is did you have a problem with that bias also? Because half the country has watched twitter push left wing talking points before elections for numerous years. In fact I remember them banning several true stories about the left.
This is pretty much dead on. All social media platforms, especially Twitter, have a hard leftwing bias. Musk has signaled that he intends neutrality for Twitter, which has triggered a meltdown from the left.
What is it they always say? "When you're accustomed to privilege equality feels like oppression."
I would put it this way- I agree with you that Twitter had a left wing bias before. It has a right wing bias now, and so far neither is enough for me to leave the platform. I don’t think this crowd sourced fact check makes any sense as it operates today, whereas I think it’s fine to point out literal factual inaccuracies.
I think I see your point. I agree that neither bias is good. The crowd sourced fact checks I am not so sure about yet. I think it could still go either way.
The administration can pass laws, do you think the GOP may have had something to say about Social security if they had won the election? I think so. Ted Cruz thinks so.
I think politicians are entitled to contrast what they’ve done to what their political opponents would do. In fact I think that’s like 90% of political campaigning. Here’s Obama getting loads of media coverage for exactly the same argument 4 days ago https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
>I think politicians are entitled to contrast what they’ve done to what their political opponents would do.
I’ll be blunt—I absolutely hate this mentality.
No, politicians (or anyone for that matter) are not entitled to contrast what they’ve vs. what their opponents *would* have done, unless they happen to be mind readers or time travelers.
If you’re fortunate enough to get elected, you’re in the hot seat. The guy (or gal) you beat, they don’t get to make the decisions. You do. You don’t get to win, make the wrong decision, and then say, “oh well the other guy would have done it way worse”.
Or unless their opponents have literally said what they would have done, which I hope you don’t object to, such as the many GOP members who support a national abortion ban. Mentioning that desire is absolutely fair game, even if they don’t get an opportunity to pass it. I don’t see how it wouldn’t be. We saw the same thing during the Obama years - “If we were in control there wouldn’t be an Obamacare/if we have control we will repeal Obamacare [our opponents won’t/wouldn’t].”
Speculation and inference are often totally reasonable.
I mean the left can just as easily post their "context" on right wing tweets as well. If the White House can't handle a bit of debate on Twitter, it reflects poorly on them imo. Let the public see both sides
The context makes it clear that the increase wasn't due to good leadership, but instead was due to high inflation. I find that helpful even though I support the current administration.
With context, it sounds like they were trying to take credit for high inflation. That probably wasn't the intention, so I think it's clear that the original statement was misleading.
It didn't claim it was passed by Republicans, it explicitly stated it was signed by President Nixon and made no claims about which party controlled Congress nor did it mention Nixon's party affiliation. Not even a (R) after his name.
looked to me like the take away was that the rule was 50 years old. would you have been happier if the context didn't mention nixon, but noted that it was because of a law that had been in effect for 50 years?
I would’ve been more comfortable if they’d mentioned the current republican candidatss for house and senate oppose this rise despite it being a GOP policy?
I can only find opinion pieces and no official republican statement promising they would cut social benefits. In any case I believe those are empty electoral promises. In my country the right wing campaigned on the promise of cutting social benefits, now that they are ruling they simply can't do it unless they want a rebellion. That's because we are in such a bad situation since we blindly followed the orders of our master Biden. The US is also in a bad place after the delusional democrat foreign policy, the last thing the republicans could do now is cut social benefits at a time where quality of life standards are dropping for everyone. Again, thanks to the bankrupt policies of your governments.
Multiple republicans have said they will not support raising the debt ceiling unless Medicare/social security receive cuts. Smith and Arrington I think? Pretty sure I was reading about them and other members of the house vocalizing this just a few weeks ago.
This is exactly the point I'm making - it's basically down to whoever can game the system to get their politicla point annotated on to the white house despite not having earned the following of the whitehouse themselves.
I don't really get what you're upset about. The algorithm seems pretty sane to me. If the Whitehouse wants to hold a press briefing, they can, but when they post on social media they invite engagement.
> I think there’s a massive difference between correcting something that is untrue, and just deciding you want to have your own say because the truth isn’t representative of what you feel is the broader issue.
Well stated. I think the job of the platform should be limited to calling out actual falsehoods, which this is not.
Additionally, a great platform could surface this kind of additional context effectively, but only as provided by the users of the platform. That's something I would love to see.
Malinformation is info that’s true but presented in a disingenuous way. Misinformation is false info that’s stemming from a person who truly believes what they’re saying. Disinformation is false info spread purposefully.
I thought during the last admin someone decided it was illegal for the President to delete tweets or block users because they become Presidential records as soon as they are created.
Hypothetical scenario: if the Ministry of Truth erases all the records of an inconvenient event in the past, would it be "misinfornation" to mention that fact?
"Malinformation is based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate." - looks like revealing inconvenient truth falls under this umbrella.
I wonder how deep the economic analysis will go to decide that a tweet needs "context"?
For example, if an administration (cough) touts that this year's economic growth has been among the highest in a decade and that an increase in spending is "paid for", but that's just because a last year's index point was in the toilet because of a pandemic and we're getting back to where we were before...
Twitter could take the same approach that TV took, and has abandoned, long ago: each side gets equal air time to present their opinion. If a twit comes from a blue politician, the red team gets to respond, and vice versa.
> and that blue and red politicians fall neatly on either side.
With hyper polarization, I don’t think this is much of a concern.
It was stunning to me how few people realized that if I saw you in a mask at the grocery store last year, I could also with high accuracy determine your thoughts on Kyle Rittenhouse or abortion.
Hard to discuss this without getting political and violating all sorts of decorum but, I guess, the system worked here?
The original White House tweet:
> “Seniors are getting the biggest increase in their Social Security checks in 10 years through President Biden’s leadership
The reality:
Inflation triggered an automatic increase in social security benefits because of a 1972 law that indexes social security checks to cost of living.
I guess it's odd claiming you did good thing X, when in reality it was bad thing Y that automatically caused good thing X. But even that's not right, because in inflation-adjusted terms, good thing X actually wasn't good at all, it was just neutral.
I agree this is weird. I guess it is meant to highlight the other party wants to get rid of social security. It is strange though to take credit for not doing something that someone else says they will do in the future.
Lee, Johnson and Scott are outside the GOP mainstream on this one. Even historically Republicans who have wanted to “kill SS” have wanted to replace it with something like they have in parts of Texas (https://www.forbes.com/sites/merrillmatthews/2011/05/12/how-...).
Hell, Nixon (before he stepped down) was ready to push for a negative income tax.
"Some Republicans" doesn't mean it's the party platform. Some Democrats have advocated nationalization of some social media platforms, that doesn't make it the party platform.
Indeed, and partisan politicians in safe seats also like to float ideas they know don't have a realistic chance of advancing in order to appeal to their ideological base. Every now and then Ted Cruz tweets about "Abolishing the IRS", a prospect I don't think any GOP policymakers are actually willing to fight for. They'll pay lip service to it, however.
The GOP has been against Social Security from the start. Their stated goal has changed variously from privatization, or voluntary enrollment, to simply slashing benefits.
Goldwater, Reagan, Bush all wanted to vastly reduce SS or privatize it completely.
More recently, the GOP congress at the end of Obama's term pushed him hard to compromise on cuts.
In 2016, Trump was unique among GOP presidential candidates in not calling for cuts.
In April of this year, Rick Scott (chair of GOP campaign apparatus) called for adding a "kill switch" on SS, Medicare, and MedicAid. Current minority leader (McCarthy) wants to couple the debt ceiling and social programs.
The only reason the GOP hasn't killed SS yet is because it's a popular program.
Cuts and privatization aren't "getting rid of" which is what this thread is about. It's like when Democrats want to reform something, Republicans will claim Democrats want to get rid of it. Which is false. Same here. I'm pretty sick of it and wish people would stop falling for things like that, when the proposed policies are actually very complex. Would privatization be bad? I don't know, I've never seen a good retort other than "markets have downturns." Would limiting firearms to someone 21+ be bad? I don't think so, but the only thing I hear against it is 18 year olds can be in the military. Those arguments somehow work on people. I guess real gripes about it don't fit into campaign ads or speeches.
Because owning a firearm is a right of the people. If you want to raise the age of adulthood so serving in the military and voting than we can talk about raising the age to own a firearm.
Privatization - SS would be replaced with a pay-as-you-go private account, similar to a 401k. I have seen some suggestions where SS is partially kept, or it becomes optional, either way, it probably kills the system because there won’t be enough money coming into the system to pay out.
Fair. SS is popular nationally across many socio-economic groupings. It’s almost impossible to touch (unlike something like abortion rights, which are widely supported, yet here we are looking at more bans, effectively the opposite of what the majority wants).
It's important to note that Democrats have been against Social Security since B. Clinton, and have made more than one attempt to privatize it. Obama set up the Bowles-Simpson commission to cut Social Security, and forced a moron like Paul Ryan into the spotlight as an "expert."
Obama is now for Social Security, now that he's out of power and he can make promises that the administration doesn't have to keep.
> Obama set up the Bowles-Simpson commission to cut Social Security
Bowles-Simpson wasn’t about Social Security specifically, and it was set up deliberately with a supermajority rule that assured if it did something controversial, like touched Social Security in an adverse way, it would fail and fall short of the threshold for proposing policy changes at all, doing nothing.
What party wants to get rid of social security? I’m not aware of any party with this in its platform or any major candidates running with this position.
I’ve seen this so much with no evidence, that it now reads like a manufactured talking point.
I’m looking forward to seeing if there are changes in discourse over the next year. Because if Twitter really does go neutral it’ll be a lot harder to push a narrative on Reddit when it’s countered on Twitter. And etc.
Lab leak for example. It was easily to silence that as conspiracy theory when all the players just happen to agree and shut down dissent.
I mean if we're being fully pedantic, _technically_ it's correct. Biden lead a huge surge in spending, which caused inflation, which caused Social Security checks to increase........
You sound like someone that hasn't used Twitter or has a short memory span, because they did direct fact checks. This was also an official government account vs a personal account (which is what Trump was using.) Twitter also evolved their system because of Trump's ramblings.
Yes. But now it's something different. The "context" notes are user submitted/voted by a selection of users.
The previous system was more of a group at twitter who verified statements. The claim is that the new "context" process is more transparent and/or egalitarian. When the truth of the matter is that it's just going to devolve into being abused by the "well ackshually" crowd.
It's also interesting to note that the same sort of context disappeared from one of Musk's tweets. So, I guess, what's good for the goose is not good for the gander.
Of course, that's not remotely how the system works or has been used. This goes into what I've said elsewhere today regarding Twitter. I've seen SO much hyperbole on what's going on, when almost nothing at all is going on in terms of moderation changes. It's so very hyper-partisan at the moment.
What? Twitter was putting these little boxes below Trump's tweets as early as 2020, often referring to his "false and debunked claims" about a future election that hadn't happened yet. They later banned him from their service entirely.
Definitely not for Biden nor current whitehouse before Musk took over. Birdwatch was developed in 2021, so it obviously wasn’t a feature when Trump was in power.
There are constitutional questions raised when intermediaries are editing a POTUS's communications. Just like there were constitutional questions that kept him from banning people.
edit: while I love the event that sparked this thread, I would be upset if they were adding this shit to Biden's personal account.
> I would be upset if they were adding this shit to Biden's personal account
I'm not sure if it's codified anywhere, but I don't think a sitting US President is afforded the luxury of a personal life while in office, outside of personal non-political relationships. Otherwise, the POTUS would just pick and choose when they were acting as a President and when they weren't as a legal loophole.
So, any public communication, wether on an official or personal account, would be considered an act of the POTUS while they're in office, no? If so, then I don't know why you'd treat it any differently than an official WH account, especially if the personal account is being used to discuss current political events relating to their role as POTUS.
> I don't think a sitting US President is afforded the luxury of a personal life while in office
It's not his personal life I'm thinking about, it's his political life. He's the top elected official, and the top representative of a political party. His political speech shouldn't be played around with, even if we can somehow rationalize political censorship for everyone else.
I think that's different than an official White House account, though, because the actual government belongs to us. In his function as head administrator of the Executive Branch, he's an employee. In his function as the winner of a presidential election, however, he's the anointed representative for a majority of US voters (more or less, because of our antiquated system), and silencing him is antidemocratic.
> In his function as head administrator of the Executive Branch, he's an employee. In his function as the winner of a presidential election, however, he's the anointed representative for a majority of US voters (more or less, because of our antiquated system)
OK, but then how do you determine when he’s acting in which capacity?
> and silencing him is antidemocratic.
These context bubbles are supplemental and apparently provided by users. They’re not hiding anyone’s speech. It’s more like boosting the most succinct, relevant reply.
Had not encountered this until today. Not a fan. If I want your opinion, I'll follow you. If your opinions are whack, I'll mute/block you. I can't do that to this overwatcher birdwatcher whatever.
Kudos for noble intentions et al, but it seems rude/wrong to insert an unsolicited opinion into conversations, especially in such a graphically highlighted/authoritative manner. I don't care if it's crowdsourced, outsourced, right, left, wrong, wise, whatever; it's uninvited and unwelcome.
simple solution: make the overwatcher a regular twitter account instead of a blue-bolt-from-god intrusion. I'd probably follow it.
A lot of people here are annoyed by this behavior(rightly so), but the reality is that a lot of supporters take these bites of info and run for miles with it. This isn't just governments either, you'll see 20 minute trash videos on YouTube that extrapolate upon one data point into a "this is why the world is collapsing" thing just to get a few million views.
I have little doubt that Musk will have this feature used capriciously, but I also think crowd sourcing fact checking/context giving is bound to have weird edgecases caused by ideological cranks.
I hate when someone on Twitter gets something wrong and then instead of deleting it they reply with "sorry I was wrong". Due to the way Twitter works very few people will see the reply, deleting is the only way to really make things right.
They should have a “retraction” feature. Go to the Tweet, it shows the original Tweet, but with a “This tweet has been retracted by its author” notice on it.
Deleting it could be interpreted as covering up one’s mistake. “Retraction” would be owning it, and in a more immediately visible way than doing so in a reply
Birdwatch isn't specific to any tweet so far as I'm aware, so long as enough twitter posters identify a post as misleading whatever note written about the tweet becomes most popular will be appended to it.
This is about as non-partisan as implementation as anybody is doing.
Free market of ideas. Don’t focus on the meaning of any given statement but the volume of attempts at contrarian statement.
What Elon’s businesses are trying to accomplish is not essential to the species. The species is not essential.
The masses are tired of being squeezed to produce as the output and comfort is squandered and monopolized.
That said, the public has to accept as well the planet is finite. Society does not just have a crony capitalism problem. The public, rich or poor, politician or citizen, has a consumption syndrome and conviction to fuck the future in service of our demand for novel experiences.
Applying the awareness of infinitely big small numbers to the economy has lifted people up materially for sure. But the literal resources are not there for everyone to have the buying power of a CEO. At the same time, no theory of science I know of says Musk and co specifically must be enabled.
I am confident in saying that your Redditsphere, like mine, is absolutely NOT representative of any general population. Hacker News is obviously even less so.
Log out of Twitter if you have one, find an Elon tweet, and start reading the tens of thousands of comments.
Bonus, if you have a well-curated account: log back in and read what comments automatically get pushed to the top. For me, it's a ton of accounts I follow being critical of Elon's takes on stuff.
You're talking about looking at replies to Elon tweets, but it's kind of a given that they're more likely to be Musk supporters simply because most healthy people don't follow or obsessively pay attention to someone they don't like?
Indeed. Demonstrating that a biased sample can generate either side of this perspective. Especially with my login/logout example. You can see all this disagreement (my followers) or all this agreement (his followers)
Because it seems my usage of bubble is not universal, just as clarification, I see every group as a bubble, there are smaller and bigger bubbles. I did not mean to imply that worshipping Elon is some kind of rarity.
How am I supposed to counter-fact this? Elon's tweets are among the most favorited tweets of all time regularly topping out over 1M. The average person likely has quite a positive view of him - the right-wing of American politics definitely does.
You did it right, this was pretty much the information I was looking for. I know neither much about the American public, nor their right-wingers, nor Twitter.
I view him favorably for a variety of reasons. I have yet to see any reason to hate him with the obsessive fervor commonly displayed on reddit. I honestly just feel like his right-wing leaning/anti narrative tweets drove the left insane.
Accusing a guy to be a pedophile with zero evidence was one thing. It's just a pretty asshole thing to do, especially when you have millions of followers and can ruin that guy's life with a tweet. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/15/elon-musk...
It was indeed a pretty asshole thing to do, but so is telling someone trying to help to 'shove it where it hurts' and as far as I'm aware, Musk is the only one of the two to have actually apologized for being an ass there.
He seems to be a guy that acts impulsively. But, being somewhat of an asshole once or twice over the years is hardly worthy of the passionate hatred some people have for him. It is more about greed/envy/etc. imho. The world is a more interesting place with Elon in it, from my point of view.
I’ve noticed a trend on YT. If someone’s going to criticize Tesla or Elon they don’t outright say the name. They say “that other big EV company” or similar. That’s about as good a demonstration of censoring dissent as can get.
The English language one worships authority, the German language side is mostly small children who are slightly left wing. That certainly falls under "somewhat"diverse IMO, which is a pretty low bar.
As far as I know the Biden administration never got one of those "fact check" warning before Elon Musk. But Trump did, so the feature would be old, but how it gets applied would be new.
It would be helpful if someone would go find some older whitehouse tweets that were similarly misleading and ought to have been contextualized in the same manner. Otherwise it's just speculation.
Besides, if the handling were really equivalent to the trump whitehouse people would be alleging that the tweet's removal violated the law because it removed the 1A protected 'fact check' text and/or violated records retention laws (both of which were argued WRT Trump). :)
I wouldn't call it an interpretation. Either they were fact checked before and a link can be shown, or they weren't. Politicians lying certainly wasn't invented in November 2022
Seems like it would be also possible that they were fact checked before and deleted it before and it happened quickly enough that it wasn't picked up on by media.
This thread was started by an "As far as I know," and I'm not sure it's one of those things that could be definitely proven either way.
The tweet wasn't lying, it was actually missing context for once. You're just so used to the former white house account holder lying that you now assume fact check == lie...
But I guess ignoring that and implying that some shadow cabal at Twitter turned off the fact checking for Biden, then Elon turned it back on, but claimed to not have not turned it on, despite things like that literally being his motivation to buy the site... is more exciting?
The Trump fact checks were a different feature that had somewhat similar results. Those were applied by the centralized Twitter team, this one is crowdsourced, and applies to lots of different accounts, not just this highly-visible one.
One possibility is that the Biden White House probably outright lies less than the Trump White House did.
The other possibility being the feature as it was applied to the Biden tweet did not exist during the Trump administration, which I posted in the original comment.
> One possibility is that the Biden White House probably outright lies less than the Trump White House did.
More likely it's not a lie because the POTUS actually believes it's true. It's not a lie if you sincerely believe it right?
Like how he keeps saying that gas was $5/gallon when he took office [1] (it was $2.39/gallon).
Or how he claims that his own son died in Iraq [2] (he died in the USA).
Though the best example would be the tale of Cornpop [3], in which a young Biden, working as a life guard at a city pool, tangles with a razor armed thug, himself with just his wits and a steel chain. It's entirely possible he thinks this actually happened.
Unless you're interpreting the tweet like [1], a lie,
> A statement intended to deceive, even if literally true.
… the tweet is factual only to the extent required to deceive the reader. As the increase is a CPI adjustment, by definition real benefits aren't moving. Then there's the entirety of the problems that are being caused by the worst inflation of my life … that's to be chalked up to the Biden admin's "leadership"?
The context changes the entire tone of the tweet, because it was a lie. The White House deleted it because they got caught in a lie.
The Biden administration should be holding itself to higher standards than this.
It's interesting that you agree with the assessment that a leader of a country isn't responsible for the windfalls from previous administrations, but ...
Then you're associating the new leader of a corporation with windfalls from previous administrations.
Back when Trump first started deleting tweets, I saw the question raised about whether that violated the presidential records act. I don't know if that was ever resolved.
One of my favorite things to hate in politics is when politicians --at all levels and all political parties-- lie and take credit for things they did not do and, in most instances, had nothing to do with.
One of those are claims of creating jobs, which is absolute horseshit. I have to stress, everyone does it. This is not about any one political party.
The current administration is claiming to have created ten million jobs. This is nothing less than preposterous. And yet, they keep repeating it daily. Because, you know, if you repeat something enough times it magically becomes true.
What really bugs me about these things is that the press never questions any of these claims. Politicians are never asked to "show the work".
I mean, if you say you created one or ten million jobs, surely you are able to present a document with data at a sufficient level of granularity to confirm this. A list of programs enacted by the regime in charge matched with the precise number of jobs created ONLY because that program was enacted.
This never happens. They all lie about this stuff. Do the masses truly believe this? If not, do politicians actually think everyone is stupid? Maybe we are. The evidence on that front is clear: The people who rise up to the top of each party and are elected into office rarely represent the best and the brightest we have to offer. In fact, in most cases these people would be ambulance chasers and bad used car salespeople if they didn't get into politics. And yet we elect them and hand over the reigns. I just don't get it.
As a simple example of things that are incomprehensible:
Why is it that we don't have a law that imposes severe penalties for politicians who lie to the public?
Imagine hiring an accountant, doctor or lawyer with the proviso that they are protected from the consequences of lying. You accountant can lie to you about your finances and there's nothing you can do about it. Anyone can see this is not a good idea. And yet, this is exactly what we have in politics. They can lie publicly, on national media and elsewhere and the consequences are exactly zero.
Some might say: Well in cases of national security and other circumstances it might be necessary to not present facts as they might exist.
I suppose I can see that argument at some levels, not all. It would have been a great idea to have a requirement for truth in what preceded the Iraq war. I think everyone can agree on that. However, I can concede circumstances might exist where telling us the truth could be detrimental. Don't know what those might be, let's just stipulate this could be the case.
OK, well, let's treat that the same way we treat search warrants and other matters: The politician has to go to a judge, present evidence in justification for having to promote a lie and obtain approval. The lie is documented and so is the decision-making process. Maybe that's a way to get around it.
Imagine a world where politicians would not be able to lie about national or international issues as well as attack their opposition with lies. I don't know about you, but would think that would qualify as progress.
Oh, yeah, maybe we can apply similar rules to the media as well.
> Seniors are getting the biggest increase in their Social Security checks in 10 years through President Biden’s leadership
The further bit of context is this is because inflation is at its highest level in 40 years. Not sure it was wise to tee that up as a comment on "President Biden’s leadership."
The thing that is, macroeconomic policy is already basically solved. It’s been understood for hundreds of years. But the lobbyists have succeeded in pumping misinformation and poisoning minds for so long that many factual untruths are blindly accepted by a large chunk of the population.
Imagine if an AI system could actually generate annotations like this... Probably too much to ask and fraught with issues, but I'd love to see what it'd do to misinfo behavior
BothSides™ does this and it annoys me: taking credit for some previously legislated action, or gas price drop or whatever. It's disingenuous, distracting, and makes me think the government thinks I'm a moron.
Voters are morons. The president has vanishingly little ability to control the economy. Even the fed, who have significant power to affect economic policy, have little power to bend it to their will.
The economy we experience today is the result of the sum of decisions around the world being made today, and for the past dozen years. Even the most powerful people on earth are just a breeze against the runaway semi truck that is the economy.
I know I’m not the only person who watched the movie idiocracy, but “the ‘conomy” is polling at the top of the list of issues for this election cycle.
Just once I’d like to see an actual economist debate some politicians who love act like them, despite having no qualifications and nothing but a list of talking points to back them up. We can all hope that this new crop of temperature readers will help educate JP and the fed about monetary policy.
I would prefer a system where the candidates setup a hierarchy of experts and advisors. The experts then debate each other on their policy positions - both long live debates and by exchange of essays. Then, a third party sums up key position differences and the two parties get to revise until they are satisfied - basically a list of policy differences. Finally, every voter takes a test where the questions ask them to assign policy positions to a candidate - e.g. "Which candidate's team supports X". The top 20, 10, 50 whatever percent of votes are used and the rest are discarded. This system lets us know that the voters know who they are voting for.
Oh, and that team of advisors and experts needs to be installed somehow in the cabinet. You wouldn't want a candidate to just get a team of persuasive people to get elected and then ignored.
The president and the Fed have enormous power over the economy. If they spoke carelessly and spooked the markets, they could cause a crash any day of the week. Look at what happened in the UK in their small economy, and imagine how much worse it would be if the US president did it.
The Fed's low rates are also largely responsible for the way the economy behaved since 2008.
The economy is like a running a relay race. Major players have significant power to screw it up, but they have little ability to fix screw ups caused by someone else.
It's beyond even the economy. Surely voters realize gas can't cost $4 forever? Even if we continue never increasing the taxes on it to match inflation, or road spending?
The discussions just around this one commodity, where the average person has major influence on their own consumption, are mind boggling.
If I go back to my rural hometown, people will tell me with a straight face that the EPA should be abolished so that we can have 99 cent gasoline again like the late 90s.
Yes, if it were any different they would need to register as lobbyists.
A disinterested yet divided electorate illustrates how well things are going since people focus on major differences with minor significance rather than sweating the details of minor differences with major significance.
If I do all the research, understand all the issues, and make a well informed voting decision, I get the same reward as if I randomly vote for the candidates with the shortest names.
A good-faith reading of a statement like "voters are morons" almost always takes it as an approximation, sufficient to describe the bulk behavior, not an absolute universal quantifier.
That might be a good faith reading, but it's not the most plausible. The most plausible is that the writer means that most other voters but himself is a moron
I went through the math on the expected value of a vote in the last election [1], and if you're in a swing state I found that the expected value of your vote is surprisingly high. I estimated that a voter in Pennsylvania in 2020 would have had an expected value of about $3000. Of course, as with the lottery, the probability of a payoff is extremely low.
I'll be honest, I didn't read your expected value article. But did it take account the difference in power voters have based on number of electoral votes per state? For example, Wyoming has 3 electoral votes and only 580,000 people, while California has 55 votes and 40M people. Wyoming has more than three times the voting power per person than a resident of California.
Yes, I did take that into consideration. Pennsylvania was the best case for a voter in 2020 because it had the highest likelihood of being the tipping point state in that election. But I also tried to estimate the expected value of a vote in California and got a number around 60 cents. So the expected value can can vary by nearly four orders of magnitude depending on the state you are in.
The main factor in this discrepancy is not so much the number of electoral votes, but the partisan lean of the state. Am election that ends up being decided by a single vote in California would imply that there were extremely unexpected results in other states. But your expected value in Florida is much higher because it would not be unusual for the election to be decided by an extremely close result in that state.
Interesting - I went through the calculation based on "chance the election would be decided by one vote; my vote" and it's pretty damn vanishingly small. (I assumed any election decided by a single vote would be decided by my vote, which isn't entirely fair, and ignored appeals, etc), but didn't value it on election spending but instead on "changes to me".
There is at least some nuance on that one-- e.g. taking credit for lowering gas prices when it's a result of distributing our strategic reserve.
In that case the administration is responsible, but it's potentially at a significant future cost. (since once the reserve is gone we'll be at even greater mercy to externally set prices).
I'm not sure which Green took credit for something they didn't do but I'm looking forward to the days of anything but first-past-the-post so parties can be held accountable.
It's a bad status quo given they work for us. Imagine having an employee that constantly lied to you in order to get a raise and took credit for things they didn't do.
Have you ever seen White House getting fact-checked with democrats in power before the acquisition? If there is any bias going on its from people that have a bone to pick with Elon and his choices
The fact that my comment got flagged for some odd reason highlights the fact that people (including on HN) dont want to hear that Elon is making twitter better and less biased
Twitter is not new though. It had sway in 2016 and 2012 elections with prominent personalities doing public relation on the platform. Saying its new to political space is pretty disingenuous
> You're getting flagged for naked partisanship
So you're allowed to support democrat agenda "nakedly", but not any other. Got it.
This is the third president in the age of Twitter. It's use in the political space has been expanding. It has had to adapt.
And I would say it didn't really have much sway in the 2012 election. It existed, politicians reached out on it, but it wasn't as major a platform as it became.
Which is part of the reason why it took until 2015 for an account explicitly for the President to be created. They were still figuring it out. Platforms themself checking facts wasn't a thing until the last few years. Before it was organizations like Snopes, Politifact, etc.
> So you're allowed to support democrat agenda "nakedly", but not any other. Got it.
No one is saying that. But your partisanship is blatantly obvious and a bit tiring.
You think just a few days into Elon's lordship of Twitter he was able to "turn-on" fact checking for the current administration? (Assuming it wasn't being applied being equally before.)
Given what's going on there I don't doubt it, incentives have changed. Like that time the republicans saw themselves getting tens of thousands of additional followers upon the announcement of the acquisition.
The current US administration is a joke. After Trump, who'd have thunk that the Americans would elect a senile mannequin as their public leader, while dim-witted self-flattering idiot "elites" run their country (and continental Europe) to the ground.
I wonder if the supposed free speech absolutists will excoriate Twitter for this, as they have in similar situations in the past?
(How you could believe Twitter adding their own message to something is against free speech I have no idea, but it was often argued before. I suspected at the time many people were claiming to be for free speech, but were actually only interested in defending speech they agreed with. Now we get a chance to see if that's true.)
> The free speech supporters would vastly prefer that.
They should not just prefer it, but actively support and defend it. It's speech by Twitter people after all.
But if you go back to when Twitter had similar responses to tweets from the last administration, you might be surprised by the reaction from many self-proclaimed free-speech supporters.
Fact Check: Not all free speech "absolutists" "excoriate" such things. Some of them have nearly always considered the context in which they're given to decide whether these kind of annotations indicate an actual fact-check, or, alternatively, a big flag that the post, podcast, or video might be something that contains genuinely interesting and informative content. Others enjoy seeing their oppressive opponents foisted upon their own petards, after the same tool did little to harm themselves to begin with, and then also seeing their opponents squeal in rage at how the turntables.
Remember by the end of his presidency, every tweet Trump tweeted was fact checked/had context added? It's funny watching the left now claim it's somehow a violation of something, especially considering this was an automated system Elon almost certainly hasn't had time to get to yet
https://twitter.github.io/birdwatch/
https://twitter.com/birdwatch/status/1585794012052611076?s=2...
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.15723.pdf