Continuing “Twitter Files” Tussle

General background: there’s an explainer here about the “Twitter Files” (and the controversies over the “Twitter Files”).

One of the controversies is about Matt Taibbi’s reporting on the Election Integrity Partnership, an academic research coalition studying misinformation related to elections.  (Here’s their primary report explaining the work relating to the 2020 election; here are explainers that the primary academic centers have offered.) 

Taibbi claimed that the EIP “succeeded in getting nearly 22 million tweets labeled in the runup to the 2020 vote,” and a related claim that EIP was partnered with a government entity seeking “elimination” of millions of tweets, which is different (and also false).   (The Tweets are still up.)  The appear to be a misreading of the EIP’s own summary of their activities. The EIP says that they notified Twitter about ~2980 Tweets (I don’t believe all of those were before the election), some of which Twitter decided to label.  The 22 million figure, instead, appears to come from the EIP’s estimate of response on the platform associated with the alleged misinformation in question, including both pre- and post-election engagement — some of which repeated false claims and some of which confronted them.   

On a program aired Thursday, Mehdi Hasan confronted Taibbi with some of the errors in Taibbi’s reporting (including this one).  Taibbi acknowledged some but later returned on Twitter to press other aspects of his reporting, including the claim about labeling millions of Tweets.  Alex Stamos, working with the EIP, debunked further.

(Update: there’s a more fulsome explanation of the debunking here, at Techdirt.)

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