Tag: twitter

Thousands on Twitter misunderstand “800 for Trump”

Summary: Tens of thousands of Twitter users misunderstood reporting about Georgia’s Floyd County recount revealing “800 for Trump” when it was featured as a trend on the platform, and mercilessly mocked and bullied Trump supporters in a straw man fallacy over their own mistake. Twitter didn’t correct them.

Math is hard (*not sarcasm) – however…

I admit that I am comically bad at math, myself. But I also don’t mock others for being bad at math. Glass houses and all.

I was not one of the people dunking on Brian Williams and Mara Gay and MNBC’s producers for covering a tweet that claimed a massive mathematical falsehood, endorsing it as true, and no one down the line realizing the mistake they were making in misunderstanding the numbers in front of them. The tweet they all thought was so profound was a blue-check-mark saying “Bloomberg spent $500 million on ads. The U.S. population is 327 million. He could have given each American $1 million and still have money left over.” -Which most people immediately laughed at but I admit that when I first read it, I was like “so what’s the error?” for a solid way-longer-than-I-should-have.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWqJCeY8cD0

After a minute my brain caught up to realize that “500 million” isn’t “1 million, 500 times” the way the author and pundits thought – it’s one dollar 500 million times (about enough to give every American $1.53).

However… The issue so many people got wrong about Georgia’s recount isn’t just a misunderstanding of math at play like the pundits in that MSNBC flub. This time, nearly 100% of the tweets making the math mistake were using that mistaken perception to ridicule Trump and Trump supporters, often accusing both of the thing they were actually guilty of (also called Narcissistic Projection).

What happened in Georgia

In Georgia, a statewide recount of votes in the presidential election was started over the weekend and on Monday (November 16th) revealed that over 2,600 votes in Floyd County had not been counted. 

The blame for how this happened lays in an unknowable area in between human error, human intent, and the error or intent in the system of Dominion tabulating machines (the same system Trump alleged was falsely tabulating votes against him)… Specifically – a human evidently failed to load a memory stick for the tabulations of an entire voting machine and this was only found out a week after the election and only because of the scrutiny happening from the required recount. So opinions will vary between human accident, human intent, and a flawed system by Dominion that allows such an error by a poll taker to occur.

https://twitter.com/scrowder/status/1328491935288397824

At the time of this writing, the statewide recount is still going on, with the deadline for completion being before Thursday (11:59 p.m. Wednesday).

The Error…

Local source, Coosa Valley News, reported that of the 2,631 ballots, “that it appeared that between 1,600 and 1,900 were cast for President Trump.” – which means that the votes that would have been left uncounted had this scrutiny not happened, favored Trump nearly 2 to 1.

Democrats on Twitter misunderstood that math, thinking the report was the opposite: that the roughly 800 votes for Biden in that batch of nearly 2,000 were a measly 800 votes for Trump.

“800 for Trump”

So many people on Twitter were tweeting mocking-LOL posts that the recount Trump supporters wanted in the state of Georgia was actually yielding over a thousand new votes for Biden and only 800 for Trump that “800 for Trump” started trending. “Trending” pages are created by Twitter editors to highlight round-ups of tweets with words and phrases that are in current high volume.

Featuring this in the side panel like that led to even more people posting with the same misunderstanding of what “net votes” means and of course none of them checked the math on their confirmation bias causing the repetition of the math error to appear in tens of thousands of tweets and retweets.

The correct response, even with this misunderstanding, is to be glad that new votes were counted that otherwise would have – not just to pretend to like Democracy when all you really care about is your candidate of choice winning – but also because this doesn’t change your candidate of choice still being the winner (so far) so there is nothing in it for you to gloat on your political opposition. You could just take the high ground and be like “yay Democracy” and support every legal vote being counted, assured that you’re still getting your way.

Instead – thousands of Tweeters couldn’t help themselves in kicking the other side when they’re down and used their false perception as club to attack.

Twitter, which has been censoring and “correcting” with vague warnings, Donald J Trump’s official account (but not Biden’s) in the months leading up to the election and especially afterward any time he tweets anything about the election (literally anything – not just disputed claims) put no correction, alert, or attempt to curtail the misinformation about the election that was spreading through any of these tweets. 

As an example, take this tweet of Trumps saying that the numbers of his votes are “up big”, which they were at the time (11:49pm, November 3rd), so that was disputed by no one. After midnight, however, vote counting in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin stopped – something I don’t think has ever been done in modern (say, post 19th century) American vote counting on election night – new gluts of votes came in, and the tides started to turn. Trump accurately said he was up in the count and raised attention to the fishy behavior and for that Twitter says “not so fast”:

Keep that standard in mind while looking through the trending page for this “800 for Trump” lie as none of them have corrections by Twitter A.I. or manual editors despite the content they’re gloating about with soppy-wet sarcasm is actually the opposite of what really happened:

No, Alyssa… Georgia is now *less blue due to the recount…

https://twitter.com/TimOBrien/status/1328522859224965120
^Tim O’Brien is an anti-Trump blue-check-mark columnist for Bloomberg and author of Trump Nation. The tweet above was screenshotted before being deleted and can be seen here:

https://twitter.com/Sharpdotjar/status/1328497266961895424
https://twitter.com/EstepHeffernan/status/1328711942962372608
https://twitter.com/Fleshfire/status/1328508241584787457
https://twitter.com/jbwing_5/status/1328543817738444806

Notice how many of these people touting math while failing the math of the claim. Hundreds of the tweets I looked through were ones like this where they are commenting on an accurate tweet (in this case, by Brendan Keefe) with their ignorance:

This guy even made a fan fiction over his error:

This one gets extra points for including the “let me get this straight” trope + “do they not know [the thing I myself am misunderstanding], or am I missing something?”

https://twitter.com/theepictheymer/status/1328522379618889729
https://twitter.com/TJGIII/status/1328516271638515712

I thought for sure this next one was a satire because they ask “since when did [thousands] become thousands?” In addition to the other falsehoods. Yikes. 

This guy with almost 40 thousand followers self-own’s with the roast “Maga. Because learnin’ is hard.” in his tweet showing that learnin, for him, is in fact difficult. 

^his bio identifies him as “Author of Goodnight Loon: Poems & Parodies to Survive Trump, and Goodnight Loon II”… Dozens of comments joined in his ridicule with various versions of the GOP being bad at math – again – while being the ones making the ridiculous math error. 

The sarcastic struggles to understand their own mistakes continue: 

https://twitter.com/angieseyy/status/1328513425190907906

Many were probably misled by this popular Leftist account with almost a million followers, whom I have caught fudging facts at least 4 other times this year: 

The irony of saying “you can’t make this shit up” – literally about shit that the speaker of the phrase made up:

“They apparently can’t count”

Will these people delete their mistakes? So far none of the above have corrected or retracted in follow up tweets as new people keep Liking and retweeting the falsehoods in their original posts.

Sadly – I saw at least a dozen tweet replies being even MORE snarky and sarcastically dismissive even after the corrections were made because they just didn’t want to believe it, didn’t want to look it up, and just stuck with the original narrative. Basically all of them went along this tone and line of logic:

^That one is the best representation of all of these as it wraps up every trop into one reply:

  • over confidence of something they’re dead wrong about,
  • attacks someones capability in sentences riddled with typos and grammar mistakes,
  • brags about how they are actively recruiting people to be as ignorant as themselves

“ur so stoopid but I’ll explain it to you, you poor dumb thing: [total falsehoods]. Get it now, looser? Lol I win. Nobody’s smart but me!” 

“It’s math not opinions”…

How / Why this happened…

The information in these tweets are technically “lies” since the content is untrue and easily verifiably so, but I doubt even one of these people are “lying” (saying something *knowing* it is untrue). Rather, this confusion stemmed from Democrats reading that “Trump could gain nearly 800 net votes” and, since none of them have ever run a business, simply didn’t know what “net” means. That ignorance combined with confidence and a fighting attitude to stick it to the Trumpkins resulted in the mass misinformation train of people bathing in their own errors and feeling like super winners about it.

If the “net 800” thing makes sense to you then skip this paragraph. If you’re still absorbing those words the way I did with the MSNBC flub because math is hard (again: not being sarcastic), then just remember that economically, “net” means the total of something after its deficits. Think of the word “net” like a physical net that you carry something in and that something being what you get to take home. As in – if our lemonade stand pays $24 for ingredients and earns $25 in sales then we sold $25 worth of product – but the “net income” (profit) for that round is only $1 (income minus expenses, which here is 25-24). This is important because Democrats want to tax and regulate businesses while not understanding – and making no effort to understand – businesses they want to tax and regulate. Many of you here no doubt thought my lemonade business example of just $1 profit ($25 in sales minus $24 in expenses) was silly because its either unrealistic that even a small business would make such a small profit margin, and/or even if they did then “oh well” because they shouldn’t be in business if they can’t earn enough to pay half of that dollar in taxes to the government (which didn’t help buy, make, or sell anything but still gets paid) plus a government forced hourly minimum wage to anyone the lemonade biz hires. My example, however, uses the average profit margin of the restaurant business, which is 3-5% (4 percent of $25 is $1).

And that’s what makes this important to spotlight. Not that people got a thing wrong or even that they were jerks about it – but that a billion dollar mass media corporation is actively censoring opinions by the President that they don’t like while not only giving safe haven to verifiable falsehoods but actually featuring them as a highlight for people to go check out.

Something to be aware of.

——————————-

Update: The following tweets originally included in this post were deleted by their [presumably embarrassed] authors so I replaced them with others above but saved the list of shame for posterity since despite being so nasty about it, NONE of them corrected their mistake in follow up tweets (correct me if I missed anyone who did) after having misled the thousands who read it – they just quietly deleted the lie and moved on.

^(the last two was a pair of those who doubled down on the falsehood when corrected by multiple people before ultimately realizing their critics were right and deleted it all) 

Dumb people think that “Jews” is a swear word or something

Leave it to dumb hippies and the people they’ve brainwashed to turn a conservative woman’s criticism of Republicans into something anti-Jewish.

Ann Coulter correctly pointed out that the CNN Republican primary debate at the Reagan Library exhibited way too much time wasted pandering to the 70% of Americans who support Israel, as Coulter does. I made the same observation in especially the following moment Ann articulated in this tweet:

She followed that observation up with the question it begs:

I chuckled when someone told me of this tweet and agreed with the sentiment only to find out the next day that I was allegedly supporting some kind of hateful anti-semitism. Huh? Even disregarding that Coulter agrees with the candidates in their support for Israel – How could making a statement about time-allocation on debate issues be hateful? Not how *is* it, but how *could* it even? This is nuts, I thought to myself. More dumb hippies just looking for excuses to try and smear people they disagree with. But then I heard other Israel supporters I respect, like Michael Medved and Dennis Prager, both criticize the Tweet as horrible and I was further confused. I still am, as I continue to try and see the critical perspective by replacing the components with other issues or demographics. Take any issue that under 10% of the population cares passionately about while over 70% of the population supports and over 80% of Republicans support – and how can one justify such repeated and blatant pandering to that issue over and over even in contexts that have nothing to do with it?

Evidently its the phrase “f—ing Jews” that is what dense people claim makes this comment ugly – but why?

What if the candidates constantly pandered to Lutherans or stock traders in every other debate answer, whether Lutheranism or the stock market was even mentioned?

“How many f—ing Lutherans do these people think there are in the United States?”
“How many f—ing Stock Brokers do these people think there are in the United States?”

Offensive and hateful towards Lutherans and stock brokers? How could anyone possibly conclude anything near such a thing?

The only possible explanation is hypersensitivity brainwash + ignorance along the same lines as people being offended by the phrase “God damn it” because they think it damns God and thus is a disrespect to their Creator when it is clearly a call for God to do the damning upon something if you’d just take 2 seconds to think critically and use 2nd Grade English skills to deconstruct the phrase. Likewise, I assume people just hear “f—-ing Jews” and have a Pavlovian response to some kind of hate.

How sad that it’s come to this.

I Support Rep Weiner

I support Rep Weiner even if this turns out to be true. it was supposed to be private, so who cares and carry on. Even though he’s my favorite congressman* and I hope he comes out of this okay, even I have to admit that this is amusing, though unfortunate, given his last name.

he’s my fave cuz I think he’s honest, he’s bold, actually explains what he believes and never shys away from opposition – always willing to take it to Fox or a right wing show that invites him on and battles it out like a champ. Stick it out and stay in office!

PS: yes, I admit that I am not going into detail and/or posting the pictures here because I like the dude. I’m biased, but I’m forthright about it…

Via ShortFormBlog:

Look, we don’t want the Weiner story to be true. But we’ve done enough tweeting in our day to know all the tricks for reading someone’s social media tracks. We spent a couple of hours digging through tweets to find out more info. And, to us, there seems to be some evidence pointing in both directions on this story. The key thing for us is the existence of the rogue tweet, which was captured by TweetCongress.org even after it was deleted. But there’s also stuff that makes us wonder. The patient zero — the first person to retweet Anthony Weiner’s NSFW tweet — was this guy, who we’ve found in our research to be overly fixated on the congressman even BEFORE the tweet in question. In fact, he posted about a cheating scandal just like this one over TWO WEEKS AGO. Really? How was he so quick to hit the trigger on this? Some other things we noticed from the scandal:

  • for On Twitter, Weiner noted the Seattle time of his Friday TV appearance. The recipient of the NSFW tweet, from Seattle, retweeted.
  • for The person at the center of the drama deleted her Twitter account — which was active as of yesterday — after the tweet.
  • for The girl in question said Weiner was her “boyfriend” in an April tweet. Yeah, so? Her and every other liberal teen female has!
  • against To disprove that the photo was of Weiner, Daily Kos has a testof the NSFW photo that suggested it was ‘shopped. Hm.

» The important things to take from this: We don’t think Weiner did anything wrong as of yet, but we do think that there is a lot to suggest one of two things: One, this was possibly a scandal planted by someone who had closely followed the congressman’s Twitter account (because, based on our research, people have), and there were somewhat bizarre things that may have connected Weiner to the girl. Given the track record of Big Journalism,where the story originated from, we’d like to see a better source tackle this thing, because we don’t trust Breitbart as far as we can throw him. We rate this an “inconclusive.”

-I don’t know what they’re talking about with Big Journalism’s track record and the author doesn’t elaborate. As far as I know, the site has a solid track record on facts (nothing has a solid record on opinion/commentary), but they may be referring to the Sherrod Brown thing, which was misreported by right wing outlets including Glenn Beck to claim Breitbart clipped a video out of context but the context was in fact present in the original post. Anyway: that part aside, I too am skeptical of this story, not because of inherit distrust of Breitbart but just cuz. Mostly cuz I want it to not be true. lulz. but whatever. Even if it is, I say if he doesn’t weasel out of it and just comes clean, he will get more support than before, including from some of his more fair minded critics. Maybe even Breitbart (who is being accused of making this whole thing up now). Actually, probably even Breitbart I’d bet. I’d put money on it that Breitbart would drop it and instead just note that no liberal would give a conservative the same free pass and move on.

UPDATE: I don’t know what any of this means but if it’s correct info then it is evidence in the direction of Weiners innocence.

UPDATE: oh wow… Breitbart issues challenge directly to Weiner and basically says exactly what I described his possible reaction being (though he might not be serious about it):

50 Cent posts pictures of him playing with stacks of money

Rapper 50 Cent has a pretty amusing Twitter and recently he posted a series of pictures of himself with a pile of money consisting of $100 bills amounting to half a million bucks. I love every one of them and wish more rich people publicly enjoyed their wealth, Scrooge McDuck style, but this is my favorite one:

Here are the pictures with the tweets:

How does he do it? Buying 30 million shares of penny stocks and instructing his Twitter followers to run up the price, for one thing…

(Video from the Colbert Report January 12, 2011)