White House deletes tweet after Twitter adds 'context' note
politico.com
politico.com
https://twitter.github.io/birdwatch/
https://twitter.com/birdwatch/status/1585794012052611076?s=2...
Now if only if the feed would stop disappearing tweets in the middle of reading them, that would be great.
I guess this can't happen with the Nitter front-end. Just use LibRedirect.
>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
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.
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.
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."
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/oct/29/fox-news-tucke...
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.
I’m done man. Have a good one. I’ll gladly read any sources you send along.
>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).
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.
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.
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.)
They for sure would since there's a word for that: demagoguery.
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.
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."
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)
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 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.
BTW loose fiscal policy did not cause inflation.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhqTxlxOQBM
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.
Also, chances are neither of the two parties fit what you want. Especially in the US it is basically choosing the lesser evil..
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.
“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.
Obviously, they are subject to all the typical "push polling" weaknesses, where people can be coaxed into voting a certain way using manipulative wording.
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.
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
- Embedded anthropologists studying populations & subcultures in Iraq & Afghanistan
- Poets and artists living in these communities
- Social scientists who study how rural Americans are used as a cheap workforce
- 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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Could you provide any specific examples of that?
Repeal Obamacare.
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.
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.
"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'.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I re-watch this one at least every couple of months: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrSAxtIYM08
The wisdom of crowds is fickle. Especially today where people have few social relationships and mass communications are so cheap.
"Stupid" is probably the wrong word here. "Gullible" is probably more apt, considering they keep falling for these.
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.
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.
Could also be? You definitely are not understanding the article.
> 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". :)
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.
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.
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.
So if Biden wants to take credit for that. Let him.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
The one thing I'm aware of on this topic is the cost of insulin, which he did lower in 2020: https://nypost.com/2020/05/26/trump-cuts-cost-of-insulin-for...
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.
It is always possible to spin anything negatively, but it might be worth considering why you're putting in this much effort.
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.
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.
> literally
Sigh.
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.
That pretty universal, no?
It's like when Canada's job growth is 70% due to government hiring and the gov't comes out and says "See how well the economy is doing?".
Or companies "spin" some negative stat into a positive one.
That's why the more transparency and readily-available information there is, the better : )
"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
“we are making progress in slowing the rate of price increases.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/12/biden-says-cpi-inflation-rep...
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.
(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%
"Making progress in slowing" is the same as "slowing", basically.
They are celebrating a decrease in the rate of price increases.
For Nixon, there was still an increasing of the rate of price increases.
I think it was MoM rate that was -0.5%, YoY rate was still above 8%.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/273418/unadjusted-monthl...
Easy brag: Inflation is low.
Hard brag: Inflation is high but not getting worse. <- Biden was here.
Desperate brag: Inflation is getting worse every month, but the amount it gets worse is dropping. <- Nixon was here.
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?
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)
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
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.
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.
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.
https://www.piratewires.com/p/birdwatch?utm_source=post-emai...
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Source: https://www.cnet.com/news/twitter-elon-musk-timeline-musk-sa...
To make it work, we need non-profit social media network. But one can dream, that is not going to happen.
Their editor culture is also pretty disciplined. I don’t think we have any reason to believe Twitter users are up to the task.
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.
I'm sure that there will be ways to game it. But it does not appear to be being gamed at the moment.
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.
> The team is on a mission that has had the support of 3 CEOs. We're cranking.
> to all team members, contributors and advisors past and present — an amazing, mission-driven set of people.
https://twitter.com/kcoleman/status/1588611638655320064
Also, Elon has endorsed it: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587798343622737925
Hoping it stays, I love the bottom up nature of it.
[1] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introduci...
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 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.
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.
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.
What is it they always say? "When you're accustomed to privilege equality feels like oppression."
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.
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”.
Speculation and inference are often totally reasonable.
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.
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.
I guess Twitter is a great platform then - FTA:
According to a description under the annotation, “Context is written by people who use Twitter, and appears when rated helpful by others.”
They can mute people but not block them.
https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformat... (paragraph 2)
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?
> According to a description under the annotation, “Context is written
> by people who use Twitter, and appears when rated helpful by others.”Here's someone with possible details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33474196
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.
The original White House tweet:
> “Seniors are getting the biggest increase in their Social Security checks in 10 years through President Biden’s leadership
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 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...
Tl;Dr: cuts, not elimination
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.
That's the only reason politicians do anything.
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.
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.
Which is exactly what happened.
Hell, Nixon (before he stepped down) was ready to push for a negative income tax.
You should not repeat fake news. This isn't true. Promulgating made-up narratives does not help anyone.
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.
/s because the interenet
Biden had been in the Senate for like 150 years so who knows maybe he did have some impact there.
So, nothing makes any sense to me.
That one or two of his tweets may have gotten a "<!> may be inaccurate" advisory is completely different from this kind of "community".
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
Oh, so you are saying they can be gamed for political benefit? Whomever has the biggest botnet gets to control the narrative?
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.
When it was a public company: “they’re a private company they can do what they want!”
Now that they are actually a private company: “they can’t do that!”
Now the problem is how much it will be politicized and cherry-picked
a) The context was helpful
b) They deleted it
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.
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
This is about as non-partisan as implementation as anybody is doing.
The worst part of this acquisition is the groan-worthy expansion of Elon worship in public discourse.
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.
That's like trying to figure out what society thinks of me by reading my birthday cards.
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.
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.
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 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.
It was the solid truth.
That's why the fact-check was to "provide context".
> 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.
Worse, they got caught in a truth
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...
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). :)
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.
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.
Then you're associating the new leader of a corporation with windfalls from previous administrations.
See the problem there?
https://twitter.com/birdwatch/status/1578004575990202370?s=4...
I wonder if it would have seen the light of day if they waited until after the acquisition though.
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.
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."
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).
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.
Just asking...
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.
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.
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 Fed's low rates are also largely responsible for the way the economy behaved since 2008.
They just don't focus a lot of their smartness on electoral issues, since the personal payoff is so near non existent.
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.
Because my vote will never decide any election.
The discussions just around this one commodity, where the average person has major influence on their own consumption, are mind boggling.
LOL. China et. al must be enjoying their popcorn.
(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.
If a person disagrees with a tweet, or wants to add context they can reply to.
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.