Tag Archives: House of Representatives

Culture, Politics

Misimpression of House Speaker Pelosi speaks volumes

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It took Facebook more than on a daily basis to downgrade a doctored video making House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seem like she was slurring her words — therefore the video itself remains on the webpage, with copycats proliferating.

A group called Politics WatchDog posted the manipulated video of Pelosi — which was slowed up to give the misimpression she was speaking in an impaired fashion at a think-tank event — at 1:29 p.m.

Nonetheless it wasn’t until after 9 p.m. on May 23, some 32 hours later, that Facebook began suppressing the video after a fact-check from 1 Facebook partner, LeadStories, was published. Facebook partner Politifact didn’t post its very own fact-check through to the following morning on May 24.
One basis for the delay: The fact-checkers needed to do their own reporting — finding audio and digital forensics experts who could verify that the video had been manipulated.

The flap on the Pelosi video reveals the limits of Facebook’s third-party fact-checking system into the battle against misinformation heading into the 2020 election cycle — and also as the company faces increasing scrutiny in Washington, including calls for this to be split up from Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren and others.

The social networking giant has taken a hands-off way of policing the veracity of content on the webpage, instead partnering with independent organizations that have get to be the company’s first and main type of defense against misinformation.

But fact-checking a post or video takes precious time, during which rumors and misinformation can continue to spread at internet speeds.
Facebook works only with fact-checkers which are an element of the International Fact-Checking Network, a global coalition of vetted fact-checkers founded by the Poynter Institute, a number one journalism think tank situated in Florida. Other people in the network through the Washington Post’s fact-checking arm, as well as the Associated Press and Factcheck.org, IFCN director Baybars Orsek said in an interview.

Culture, Ethics, Finances, History, Politics

Should we take Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez seriously, and not literally?

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Trump and Ocasio-Cortez are rash, unapologetic, and enigmatic New Yorkers with ardent cult followings. They will have equally tenuous associations with reality. While President Trump and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., stand starkly against one another, they are pretty similar in their refusal to accept the seriousness of the workplaces they hold.

To her credit, Ocasio-Cortez became the youngest person in the home of Representatives while operating as a waitress. That is a distinctly American accomplishment, one which deserves our admiration.

In order to his credit, Trump was a billionaire who paid attention to the lamentations of ordinary Americans and defeats out probably the most talented industry of presidential primary applicants inside our recent history to be the president of America.

The DNC and RNC establishments took neither Ocasio-Cortez nor Trump seriously, and today they are uniquely positioned to determine the terms of these policies and strategies so that they should start acting honestly like it.

Ocasio-Cortez’s gripes with fact-checking rough mirror billionaire business owner and Trump ally Peter Thiel’s distillation of the president’s relationship along with his critics.

“I think a significant factor that needs to be distinguished here is that the mass media is always getting Trump literally. It is no way takes him seriously, but it usually takes him actually,” Thiel told the Nationwide Press Club through the 2016 election, channeling columnist Salena Zito. “I believe lots of voters who vote for Trump get Trump seriously, however, not literally, when they hear things such as the Muslim comment or the walls comment, their question isn’t, ‘Are you likely to build a walls like the Great Walls of China?’ or, you understand, ‘How exactly will you enforce these assessments?’ What they hear will be we are going to possess a saner, a lot more sensible immigration policy.”

Thiel’s evaluation is correct. Nonetheless, it highlights a single flaw with both Trump and AOC’s methods in public messaging.

Both stoke fears when advocating their respective policies. Trump depends on fearmongering with the imagery of “rapists and murderers” crossing our southern border to outlandishly advocate for pretty commonsense border protection. AOC forebodes that “like, the planet is gonna finish in 12 many years,” if we don’t deal with climate change, accurately diagnosing our political sphere’s apathy towards climate modify, but ineptly advocating for an Eco-friendly New Deal that may do nothing to lessen greenhouse gasoline emissions and everything to nationalize vast swaths of the United States economy.

We do not doubt that Trump, a Queen’s outsider who built his brand name to enter the billionaires’ golf club, and Ocasio-Cortez, a millennial self-starter who has observed – first-hand – a couple of failures of the best economic system in history, genuinely wish to prove their authority within their positions.

However, they ought to begin rising to the event. They are not courtroom jesters, eliciting few times of reality, bookended by jokes and nonsense. They are users and cultural leaders of the governing bodies of the free world, and the general public and the media, on both sides of the aisles, must keep them compared to that standard.