If it weren’t for your meddling children and your dog…whistles, President Joe Biden could have got away with it.
The addition of “reader context” to Twitter, a social media platform that Elon Musk has taken over, is a great addition. It allows people to quickly verify false claims made by government officials. These are not “fact-checkers,” who work for biased organizations such as Snopes or PolitiFact.
Biden has been the recipient of this type of fact-check several times. A Friday, he received one that made a big claim about his handling of the national purse.
Biden claims that former President Donald Trump raised the deficit for four consecutive years. However, over the past two years, his administration has reduced the deficit by more than $1.7 trillion.
He tweeted, “The largest deficit reduction in American History.”
Under my predecessor, the deficit went up four years in a row.
In the last two years, my Administration cut the deficit by more than $1.7 trillion.
The largest deficit reduction in American history.
— President Biden (@POTUS) February 11, 2023
America, enter you.
The pop-up below Biden’s tweet highlighted two key pieces of context that neither Biden nor his administration thought was important to add. It pointed out that the claim was statistically accurate, but it was misleading in its claims.
It made it clear that COVID spending caused huge deficits in 2020 & 2021, and that its end resulted in the deficit reduction of 2022.
It also notes that Biden’s spending increases actually increased the deficit in 2022, which is now 41 percent higher than Trump’s largest non-COVID budget.
These facts were then reaffirmed by a variety of sources that you can view to verify them. These facts are hard to dismiss as right-wing propaganda, which is the good part about them being primarily left-leaning.
This honest fact-checking likely has shredded much of the Democrat’s narrative construction. Despite nearly every outlet being biased to the left and trying to promote Democrat propaganda, Twitter remains the de facto town square. These tweets will be more appealing to everyday Americans than falsehoods.
It will be fascinating to see how fact-checks against politicians on both sides work over time, and whether it changes the national conversation.
