[HN Gopher] White House deletes tweet after Twitter adds 'contex...
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White House deletes tweet after Twitter adds 'context' note
Author : rmason
Score : 241 points
Date : 2022-11-04 19:11 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.politico.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.politico.com)
| dstola wrote:
| okdood64 wrote:
| 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.)
|
| I'd imagine it would take more time.
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| 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.
| rideontime wrote:
| This is a community-provided note. Elon had nothing to do with
| it, but confirmation bias is in full effect.
| dstola wrote:
| 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
| bena wrote:
| You do know Twitter hasn't existed for that long, right. It
| was founded in 2006.
|
| The @POTUS account wasn't created until 2015.
|
| Twitter in the political space is still relatively new.
| You're getting flagged for naked partisanship.
| dstola wrote:
| 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.
| bena wrote:
| 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.
| nickpinkston wrote:
| 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
| throwthere wrote:
| 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.
| peteradio wrote:
| "Through Biden's leadership"
|
| Biden had been in the Senate for like 150 years so who knows
| maybe he did have some impact there.
| kingTug wrote:
| Ironically Biden's pre-whitehouse career involved a lot of
| wanting to make cuts to social security.
| exabrial wrote:
| 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........
|
| /s because the interenet
| snarf21 wrote:
| 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.
| robomartin wrote:
| > the other party wants to get rid of social security
|
| You should not repeat fake news. This isn't true.
| Promulgating made-up narratives does not help anyone.
| prepend wrote:
| 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.
| nullc wrote:
| > is meant to highlight the other party wants to get rid of
| social security
|
| I didn't know if eliminating social security was actually a
| part of the republican platform, though it seemed very
| unlikely.
|
| I googled and found:
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/27/false-
| cla...
| RunningDroid wrote:
| Counterpoint from a quick DDG search:
| https://www.marketwatch.com/story/yes-some-republican-
| senato...
|
| Tl;Dr: cuts, not elimination
| atdrummond wrote:
| 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.
| smileysteve wrote:
| Rick Scott, chair of the National Republican Senatorial
| Committee - is outside the GOP mainstream. Interesting
| context.
| partiallypro wrote:
| "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.
| smileysteve wrote:
| Rick Scott, chair of the National Republican Senatorial
| Committee
| alistairSH wrote:
| 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.
| partiallypro wrote:
| 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.
| parineum wrote:
| > The only reason the GOP hasn't killed SS yet is because
| it's a popular program.
|
| That's the only reason politicians do anything.
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| 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.
| ahallock wrote:
| People were saying this exact thing under the tweet. So that's
| probably why it was deleted.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| My favorite DC sound bite:
|
| "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
| nullc wrote:
| > 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)...)
| weberer wrote:
| - Civilization V
| throwthere wrote:
| - mensetmanusman
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| 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.
| moralestapia wrote:
| That would be the 2nd (derivative) right?
| jlrubin wrote:
| money = money(t)
|
| inflation = d money / dt
|
| rate of increase of inflation = d^2 money / dt^2
|
| rate of change in rate of increase of inflation = d^3 money /
| dt^3
|
| rate of increase of inflation was decreasing = sign(d^3 money
| / dt^3)
| moralestapia wrote:
| Huh?
|
| I parse it as,
|
| money = money(t)
|
| inflation = d money / dt
|
| rate of change (increase or decrease) on inflation = d^2
| money / dt^2
|
| ^^^^ and this is the one w/ a low value
| eyegor wrote:
| I believe they're counting inflation itself as a derivative
| lilyball wrote:
| 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")
| realgeniushere wrote:
| Biden said a similar thing recently, bragging that the (high)
| rate of inflation was holding steady.
| pakyr wrote:
| 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.
| hartator wrote:
| > When? He bragged in July when the MoM rate was zero and
| the YoY rate fell by half a percent.
|
| I think it was MoM rate that was -0.5%, YoY rate was still
| above 8%.
| pakyr wrote:
| 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).
| totalZero wrote:
| He did so on 60 Minutes about a month ago:
|
| https://youtu.be/HfNnuQOHAaw?t=15
| pakyr wrote:
| 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).
|
| [1]
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/273418/unadjusted-
| monthl...
| hailwren wrote:
| Not the one gp was referencing, but here's the Reagan quote
| pretty much verbatim from Biden:
|
| "we are making progress in slowing the rate of price
| increases."
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/12/biden-says-cpi-inflation-
| rep...
| pakyr wrote:
| >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.
| purpleblue wrote:
| That feature is really awesome and game changing I think, as long
| as it can't be gamed or brigaded, etc.
| jedberg wrote:
| 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.
| akomtu wrote:
| 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?
| Waterluvian wrote:
| If we're thinking about the same situation, it was whether the
| President can block people, thus excluding them from civic
| discourse.
|
| They can mute people but not block them.
| codefreeordie wrote:
| I recall a time a few years ago when it was deemed illegal for
| the president to delete Twitter content
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| 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.
| happytoexplain wrote:
| >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.
| hackyhacky wrote:
| 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.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| This is also true for other large bureaucracies. I see this
| type of cherry picking and fighting over credit often at work
| as well.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > 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.
| [deleted]
| yamtaddle wrote:
| > 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.
| kaba0 wrote:
| Thanks, interesting comment.
|
| 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.
| mjevans wrote:
| 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.
| kaba0 wrote:
| 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?
| [deleted]
| lisper wrote:
| > 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.
| noasaservice wrote:
| I take it you've never seen the 'joke' political surveys
| that ask the following:
|
| "Do you want to repeal suffrage?"
|
| And naturally, most have no clue that has to do with
| women's voting rights, and asking to repeal them.
|
| Voters are very stupid. And when a group gets smarter,
| gerrymandering comes in to 'lower the average'.
| skissane wrote:
| > "Do you want to repeal suffrage?"
|
| > 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.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > "Suffrage" itself is simply who gets the right to vote.
|
| No, suffrage is the right to vote. Not who. So 'repeal
| suffrage' simply means repealing the right to vote. It is
| not confusing, just absurd.
| skissane wrote:
| 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.)
| [deleted]
| Aunche wrote:
| > 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.
| kaba0 wrote:
| 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.
| hackyhacky wrote:
| > 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.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| dustingetz wrote:
| 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
| elmomle wrote:
| 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.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| 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.
| jasmer wrote:
| I think this is a bit hyperbolic language.
|
| 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.
| kaimalcolm wrote:
| 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.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| > It's not 'cruel' for any administration to indicate the
| obvious facts without some arbitrary historical and legal
| context.
|
| Yes, it is. A leader's first responsibility is to tell the
| truth -- and citing misleading statistics is worse than an
| outright lie.
|
| It is cruel to lie to people in a way that causes them harm.
| gleenn wrote:
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Could also be just adjusting to inflation
|
| Could also be? You definitely are not understanding the
| article.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| 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_.
|
| Emphasis is mine; added for "context". :)
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > "Lowest unemployment ever!"
|
| 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.
| treeman79 wrote:
| Over spending / printing money by the government is the
| cause of inflation.
|
| So if Biden wants to take credit for that. Let him.
| zwily wrote:
| My reaction when I saw that tweet was "is the White House
| seriously blaming our record inflation on Biden's
| leadership?"
| EricDeb wrote:
| partially, it is happening worldwide though
| pastacacioepepe wrote:
| > 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.
| simonsarris wrote:
| 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.
|
| May 2021 (with forecast!)
| https://twitter.com/WhiteHouse/status/1398685824934363138
|
| Dec 2021
| https://twitter.com/whitehouse/status/1470870982588088325
|
| August 2022
| https://twitter.com/whitehouse/status/1554497308024311809
| z9znz wrote:
| 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).
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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?
| z9znz wrote:
| 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.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| ...from another account.
| totalZero wrote:
| Seems fair game to compare Biden's White House tweets to
| the tweets from Trump's account while he was the sitting
| President.
| z9znz wrote:
| 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.
| thepasswordis wrote:
| Most (all?) of the things that Trump was posting he was
| posting from his personal account.
| the_third_wave wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Chewbacca_Defense
| EricDeb wrote:
| 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)
| nullc wrote:
| This one was essentially choice since, with the relevant
| context, the tweet essentially was attributing near record
| inflation to Biden's leadership.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| 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.
| hackyhacky wrote:
| 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."
| makomk wrote:
| 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.
| atdrummond wrote:
| 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.
| atdrummond wrote:
| 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.
| smileysteve wrote:
| Don't lose the "Biden administration" context.
|
| 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)
| ajross wrote:
| > 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.
| ravel-bar-foo wrote:
| 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.
| jallen_dot_dev wrote:
| 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).
| dools wrote:
| 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.
| dools wrote:
| 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.
|
| BTW loose fiscal policy did not cause inflation.
| [deleted]
| mc32 wrote:
| Question, is/was the Tweet covered under the Presidential
| Records Act?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_Records_Act
| codingdave wrote:
| In short, no - there was a bill to make it so, but it died:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVFEFE_Act
| mym1990 wrote:
| 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.
| aaron695 wrote:
| dotnet00 wrote:
| A bit of extra context to this is in a similar note on
| https://twitter.com/RealSpikeCohen/status/158787313726963712...
| which clarifies that the feature had been in beta since January
| 2021 and was not related to Musk's purchase.
| h43z wrote:
| Have there been these "context notes" before?
| r00fus wrote:
| Definitely not for Trump - it's a recent twitter feature (pre-
| Musk). But it's usage recently has spiked and is more like a
| pinned reply.
| partiallypro wrote:
| 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.
| bena wrote:
| 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.
| jandrese wrote:
| > The "context" notes are user submitted/voted by a
| selection of users.
|
| Oh, so you are saying they can be gamed for political
| benefit? Whomever has the biggest botnet gets to control
| the narrative?
| nightski wrote:
| Alternative viewpoints is not controlling a narrative.
| jandrese wrote:
| If every comment you make gets appended with "Actually:
| vaccines cause autism" then that's narrative control.
| partiallypro wrote:
| 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.
| hersko wrote:
| By Trump they directly "fact" checked the tweets.
| r00fus wrote:
| There are thousands of Trump's tweets that were bald-faced
| lies that did not get fact checked. Instead people replied
| in the comments.
|
| That one or two of his tweets may have gotten a "<!> may be
| inaccurate" advisory is completely different from this kind
| of "community".
| lawn wrote:
| I always thought Trump's tweets were a big reason for
| these context notes being added in the first place.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Yeah but the tooling has evolved over time. If those got
| tweeted today, there would be "context" added on many of
| them.
| roflyear wrote:
| Let's see if that is true! We should find out, right?
| bpodgursky wrote:
| If you have a 80 million follow account, go for it. Not
| sure what you're suggesting.
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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.
| awb wrote:
| > 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.
| [deleted]
| supernova87a wrote:
| 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...
|
| Who decides whether that's context-worthy?
| kreetx wrote:
| > According to a description under the annotation, "Context is
| written > by people who use Twitter, and appears when
| rated helpful by others."
| nomel wrote:
| > appears when rated helpful by others.
|
| Here's someone with possible details:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33474196
| jaybaxter wrote:
| 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:
|
| https://twitter.github.io/birdwatch/
|
| https://twitter.com/birdwatch/status/1585794012052611076?s=2...
|
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.15723.pdf
| [deleted]
| Waterluvian wrote:
| BothSides(tm) 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.
| lesuorac wrote:
| 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.
| kube-system wrote:
| 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.
| deepsquirrelnet wrote:
| 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.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| 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.
| twblalock wrote:
| 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.
| kube-system wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Voters are pretty smart.
|
| They just don't focus a lot of their smartness on electoral
| issues, since the personal payoff is so near non existent.
| smileysteve wrote:
| To confuse intelligence and smarts, and rip off George
| Carlin, the average voter has an IQ of 100.
| EricDeb wrote:
| no they're not the payoff is so near non existent because
| they don't focus on electoral issues but cultural issues
| adolph wrote:
| 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.
| stefan_ wrote:
| 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.
| kube-system wrote:
| 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.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Are you a voter?
|
| Just asking...
| andrewflnr wrote:
| 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.
| lesuorac wrote:
| Only like 25% of the US votes so it's a decent chance the
| poster isn't a voter.
| kube-system wrote:
| I've cast my share of moronic votes during my lifetime.
| bombcar wrote:
| I mean if you work out the cost-benefit analysis of voting
| in national elections, it looks damn like the lottery ...
| antognini wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1]: https://joe-antognini.github.io/misc/decisive-vote
| buerkle wrote:
| 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.
| antognini wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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".
| antognini wrote:
| Yes, in absolute terms, even in a swing state the odds
| that a single vote will determine the election are small,
| roughly one in a million.
| personjerry wrote:
| It's targeted at people who aren't as smart as you, which I
| guess is a lot of people
| hackerlight wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| nullc wrote:
| > or gas price drop
|
| 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).
| btilly wrote:
| The "context" note is based on a program named birdwatch.
|
| According to rumor, virtually the entire team responsible for
| birdwatch just got laid off.
|
| I'm curious what the future of this kind of context will be.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| 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.
| yed wrote:
| That is exactly what birdwatch is: https://blog.twitter.com/e
| n_us/topics/product/2021/introduci...
| nicce wrote:
| 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.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| 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?
| nomel wrote:
| 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.
| krapp wrote:
| 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.
| ravel-bar-foo wrote:
| 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.
| nomel wrote:
| More details about Birdwatch:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33474196
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| rmason wrote:
| Though some may dislike it, I actually am glad that Twitter under
| Elon Musk is fact checking both sides.
| kaesar14 wrote:
| Elon has made no content moderation changes to Twitter yet.
| This feature has existed for 8 months and is community driven:
| https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2022/building-...
| .
|
| The worst part of this acquisition is the groan-worthy
| expansion of Elon worship in public discourse.
| Semaphor wrote:
| Worship of Elon? In what bubble? The German Reddit sphere
| (somewhat diverse) and HN both seem to think of him as a joke
| at best.
| fazfq wrote:
| I will choose not to believe that the "german reddit
| sphere" is politically diverse in a meaningful way.
| Semaphor wrote:
| More diverse than my friend and family or HN.
|
| 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.
| Semaphor wrote:
| 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.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| 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.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| 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?
| Waterluvian wrote:
| 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)
| VectorLock wrote:
| Is the Elonsphere more or less representative of the
| general population than the Redditsphere or the
| HackerNewssphere?
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Probably just as bad, if not worse. But that makes the
| point, no? Go find a biased sample and you can make any
| narrative work.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Log out of Twitter if you have one, find an Elon tweet,
| and start reading the tens of thousands of comments.
|
| That's like trying to figure out what society thinks of
| me by reading my birthday cards.
| kaesar14 wrote:
| 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.
| ianai wrote:
| 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.
| hersko wrote:
| 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.
| lambic2 wrote:
| 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...
| nverno wrote:
| 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.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| 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.
| Semaphor wrote:
| 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.
| wilg wrote:
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/1304563/us-adults-
| impres...
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| The average person does not and never has used twitter on
| a daily basis.
| cal85 wrote:
| Huh? I have seen the opposite, a huge outpouring of vitriol
| towards him on every platform I've seen.
| yehCuz wrote:
| kaesar14 wrote:
| Try loading an Elon tweet and just reading the replies.
| cal85 wrote:
| By "in public discourse" you meant specifically within
| the direct replies to Musk's own tweets?
| kaesar14 wrote:
| Yes, that's how Twitter works? People reply to Tweets.
| cal85 wrote:
| You've got me there.
| Ambolia wrote:
| 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.
| nullc wrote:
| 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). :)
| jdminhbg wrote:
| > But Trump did, so the feature would be old,
|
| 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.
| mikkergp wrote:
| That certainly is one interpretation of the facts.
| Ambolia wrote:
| 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
| majormajor wrote:
| 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.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| 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?
| kaesar14 wrote:
| 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.
| osrec wrote:
| > One possibility is that the Biden White House probably
| outright lies less than the Trump White House did.
|
| If you say anything anti you know who, the HN community
| doesn't seem to like it... I fully expect to be downvoted
| too :P
| whateveracct wrote:
| HN is full of contrarians. They aren't Trumpers but they
| like arguing with people who hate him.
| koolba wrote:
| > 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.
|
| [1]: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/28/politics/fact-check-
| biden-gas...
|
| [2]:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/01/us/politics/biden-
| ukraine...
|
| [3]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-
| news/2019/sep/16/corn-pop-joe...
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Biden's original tweet was not an outright lie. It was
| even a half-lie.
|
| It was the solid truth.
|
| That's why the fact-check was to "provide context".
| deathanatos wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33473072
| ahallock wrote:
| They claim this new system is independent of Musk taking over
| Twitter, but the timing is interesting.
| mmazing wrote:
| 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.
|
| See the problem there?
| pessimizer wrote:
| COLA isn't a windfall. It is literally meant to restore
| recipients to the same position they were in last year.
| joemazerino wrote:
| Does Twitter do this for other governments or just the White
| House?
| Hamcha wrote:
| Whoever read XKCD #1085[1] and decided it needed to be a real
| thing is my hero.
|
| Now the problem is how much it will be politicized and cherry-
| picked
|
| [1]: https://xkcd.com/1085/
| KerrAvon wrote:
| It already has. Emerald boy has deleted context applied to his
| own tweets, and some of the context being applied to Dem posts
| is right-wing bullshit.
| SauciestGNU wrote:
| 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.
| robomartin wrote:
| 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.
| SilverBirch wrote:
| 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.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| 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.
| SilverBirch wrote:
| So your claim here is that people don't know Richard Nixon
| was a republican?
| sigstoat wrote:
| 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?
| SilverBirch wrote:
| 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?
| vorpalhex wrote:
| If truthful context makes you retract your claim.. you may be a
| bit less than truthful.
| SilverBirch wrote:
| 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.
| keneda7 wrote:
| 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.
| SilverBirch wrote:
| 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.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > 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.
| keneda7 wrote:
| 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.
| prepend wrote:
| That's not a right wing talking point though is it? The
| increase was solely due to high inflation. The
| administration has no decision in the matter.
| SilverBirch wrote:
| 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.
| nomel wrote:
| This post and comment section is about things that are
| happening now, not things that might have happened if
| other things would have happened.
| SilverBirch wrote:
| 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...
| [deleted]
| yucky wrote:
| If you consider the truth to be a right wing talking point,
| well then I guess they would agree with you.
| Mechanical9 wrote:
| 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.
| abraae wrote:
| > 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.
| ajhurliman wrote:
| 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.
| jmull wrote:
| 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.)
| stale2002 wrote:
| Fact checking is way better than just banning people.
|
| The free speech supporters would vastly prefer that.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| I feel like editorializing people's tweet's is insulting, and
| patronizing and is basically the platform abusing its own
| users.
|
| If a person disagrees with a tweet, or wants to add context
| they can reply to.
| goatcode wrote:
| 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.
| guywithahat wrote:
| 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
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