This feels like a nice crisp example of how Twitter is broken in ways that generate disinformation. A user with 531 followers, not someone who can reasonably be expected to treat their tweets as a journalistic product or employ a factchecker, made an understandable mistake. This produced a politically-potent but inaccurate soundbite.
A substantial fraction of the quote-tweets are refutations. These are only visible if you check for them explicitly. This creates a confirmation bias trap: if you think the economic left is pushing a false narrative, you’ll be more likely to check, see that the tweet is wrong, and reinforce that belief. And if you think that inequality is a huge problem and the economic situation of the poor is dire, then you’ll be less likely to check, again reinforcing that belief.
This is specifically a property of systems that don’t have downvotes and of systems that don’t have a good way of sorting replies, which is why this sort of thing is especially common and especially bad on Twitter..
This feels like a nice crisp example of how Twitter is broken in ways that generate disinformation. A user with 531 followers, not someone who can reasonably be expected to treat their tweets as a journalistic product or employ a factchecker, made an understandable mistake. This produced a politically-potent but inaccurate soundbite.
A substantial fraction of the quote-tweets are refutations. These are only visible if you check for them explicitly. This creates a confirmation bias trap: if you think the economic left is pushing a false narrative, you’ll be more likely to check, see that the tweet is wrong, and reinforce that belief. And if you think that inequality is a huge problem and the economic situation of the poor is dire, then you’ll be less likely to check, again reinforcing that belief.
This is specifically a property of systems that don’t have downvotes and of systems that don’t have a good way of sorting replies, which is why this sort of thing is especially common and especially bad on Twitter..
The discourse of screenshots of tweets shared on Facebook (where I ran into this) is even worse, since they’re not even attached to global replies
Downvotes don’t seem to necessarily fix the problem?
How do you check for quote tweets?