Matt Margolis of PJMedia.com documents a significant change at a major social media company.
It is truly a new era at Twitter! Yet another tweet from Joe Biden’s official presidential account has been fact-checked!
In a tweet posted Sunday, Biden used a more flattering metric on gas prices—a major issue of the 2022 midterm elections—and got slapped with a context fact-check.
“Right now, the most common price at gas stations across the country is $3.19 per gallon,” Biden tweeted Sunday. “That’s progress.”
It’s also grossly misleading because the average price is $3.80/gallon—a full 61 cents higher than the price Biden quoted, and context has been added to the tweet to differentiate between the most common price and the average.
“Biden is referring to the ‘most common gas price’ as oppose [sic] to the average gas price of $3.800 (11/6/22). The most common is the ‘mode’ gas price. Neither are wrong and politicians tend to reference the one that is lower. The mode diminishes high gas states from the equation,” reads the context fact-check.
Last week, the White House posted a tweet hailing “President Biden’s leadership” for the increase in Social Security payments, which was flagged as misleading because the increase in Social Security payments was actually caused by a 40-year high in inflation. The tweet was later deleted by the White House—an action that appears to be in violation of the Presidential Records Act, according to a watchdog group called Protect the Public’s Trust (PPT).
Biden was also fact-checked for an October 28 tweet touting his Inflation Reduction Act taxing 55 big corporations making $40 billion collectively, when in actuality, only 14 were eligible to be taxed under the law.
Last week, Biden accused Twitter, under Elon Musk’s leadership, of spreading “lies all across the world.”
