Middleboro Review: Fact Checker: Trump’s caravan of misinformation

Saturday, October 27, 2018

Fact Checker: Trump’s caravan of misinformation

The truth behind the rhetoric

Trump’s caravan of misinformation

First, you have a caravan of thousands of Central Americans headed toward the U.S.-Mexico border. Second, you have President Trump’s penchant for false or misleading claims stoking fear about immigration. Add it all together and you get a bunch of Pinocchios.

The Trump administration sees this slow-moving, faraway caravan of Central Americans — many of them women and children — as an urgent threat. But Trump and top administration officials have backed up their case poorly, with a torrent of misinformation and unsubstantiated claims about how the caravan started. After Trump got the ball rolling, Vice President Pence and the Department of Homeland Security also made faulty claims.

The caravan might have been orchestrated by Democrats or Venezuela, they say. It includes criminals, or MS-13 gang members, or possible terrorists, or people of (gasp!) Middle Eastern descent, they add. There’s no evidence for any of this Four Pinocchio balderdash.

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Exactly how many jobs are at risk if arms sales with Saudi Arabia are cut off?

Was it 450,000 or 1 million jobs? Or did President Trump say 500,000 or 600,000?

Trump actually used all four figures in the span of six days. When it comes to business deals, Trump concedes he’s the kind of salesman who uses hyperbole here and exaggeration there. So the president isn’t a precise-numbers kind of guy, but this Saudi stuff is ridiculous.

First off, as we’ve reported, the $110 billion arms sale is still a work in progress. There appear to be few, if any, signed contracts. The specific items that are listed amount to $28 billion. (And those were negotiated by the Obama administration.) Even if the full $110 billion in sales went through, that wouldn’t amount to 450,000, 500,000, 600,000 or 1 million jobs. A very generous estimate would be 225,000 jobs and many of those would be in Saudi Arabia. Trump earned Four Pinocchios.

Beware of the bots

We just noticed an April study by the Pew Research Center, which found “that two-thirds of tweeted links to popular websites are posted by automated accounts — not human beings.” The same study found that two-thirds of tweeted links about “news and current events” come from bots. Fifty-seven percent to 66 percent of links to sites that have ideologically mixed or centrist audiences are from bots. Forty-one percent of links to sites with primarily liberal audiences and 44 percent of links to sites with primarily conservative audiences come from bots.

Pew’s study measured only the quantity of links tweeted by the bots. While many provide real-time updates to breaking news, others are used to further misleading political discourse or spread misinformation. With the midterms right around the corner, this is a good reminder of the pitfalls facing news consumers in the age of social media.

We’re always looking for fact-check suggestions.

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Scroll down for this week’s Pinocchio roundup.

— Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly

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