Folks, stop falling for twitter manipulation and clickbait soundbites

[Otto Lidenbrock]

When candidates do town halls they are not giving five word answers. That should be pretty damn obvious. Yet this page in the past 24 hours has been full of misrepresentation of two responses Joe Biden gave. One about a republican VP and one about coal miners learning to code.

Here is an example of how Twitter pundits blow up these out of context.

Link to tweet

The day after Mr Weigel provides the full answer.

Link to tweet

Now you may still disagree with Biden's analysis but it's a much more thorough answer than reported initially where the hot-take that went viral was one line at the start and one line at the end while everything in between got glossed over.

I made the same point regarding Pete Buttigieg's comments about Anthony Kennedy and the Supreme Court in October. A viral tweet that gathered 10000 likes was a total false representation. The viral tweet was a deliberately cut out snippet with the context removed and provided no source so if you were like me who was sceptical you had to find the link yourself and read it in full context for yourself. If you did that, like me, you'd realise that tweet and the outrage it caused was a lie to smear Pete when he was on a surge.

It was a lengthy post but something I saw through then and urge others to do so now.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/1287323624

I'm an undecided voter because no candidate really strikes me as particularly standing out. They all are flawed in some ways. But as a voter it's my responsibility to learn about them. Watch their speeches myself, hear the interviews myself, read the articles myself. Social media is an open forum for disinformation and now more than ever we as voters should do our own homework rather than get sucked into every tweet we want to be true.

[George II]

1. Good to see that Weigel corrected himself from his earlier tweet and used the REAL quote!

[paleotn]

2. Be careful of manipulation..

We saw enough of that in 2016 to be a bit more wary this time around. Just take a moment or two to process what we see before our fingers of outrage start typing away. That's all I ask.

[betsuni]

3. First thing I thought of was the Clinton comment taken out of context.

"'We're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.' Stripped of their content my words sounded heartless. Republican operatives made sure the clip was replayed virtually nonstop on Facebook feeds, local radio and television coverage, and campaign ads across Appalachia for months. ... If you listened to the full answer and not just that one garbled sentence pulled out of it, my meaning comes through reasonably well. ... I was intensely concerned about the impact on families and communities that had depended on coal jobs for generations. That's why I had proposed a comprehensive $30 billion plan to help revitalized and diversify the region's economy. But most people never heard that. ... If you were already primed to believe the worst about me, here was confirmation."

From "What Happened"