A leading economist has revealed that Facebook placed a fact-checking tag on a post claiming the US has entered a recession, giving it a “partially false” rating as President Biden continues to reject the bleak evaluation of the economy.
Dr. Phillip Magness, director of research and education at the American Institute for Economic Research, a libertarian think tank, shared a screenshot of his Facebook account, which shows the social media site had “verifiers of independent facts” that revised its publication from July 24. , and which they found to be “partially false”.
“We live in an Orwellian hell,” Magness tweeted Thursday. “Facebook is now ‘fact-checking’ anyone who questions White House puns on recession definition”.
Facebook added a warning to the post warning that “people who repeatedly share false information may have their posts pushed down in the News Feed so others are less likely to see them.”
Magness, the director of research and education at the American Institute for Economic Research, took to Twitter to express his dismay. Twitter / @PhilWMagness
The correction comes after Biden last week denied the US was in recession, despite new data showing GDP had contracted for a second straight quarter, meeting the long-accepted definition of a recession.
Speaking to reporters on Thursday, the president tried to downplay the troubling report and focus on near-record and low unemployment numbers and his administration’s progress on measures to control rising inflation.
“This doesn’t look like a recession to me,” he said, prompting GOP leaders to accuse the president of “lighting the gas” on the nation, and the Republican National Committee declaring that the GDP report was indicative of “Biden’s recession.”
Economist Phillip Magness accused Facebook of being “Orwellian” after its post claiming the US was in recession was found to be partially false. American Institute of Economics
Other senior administration officials followed Biden’s lead in rejecting the report showing the economy contracted at an annual rate of 0.9%, following the 1.6% drop in first term.
“We should avoid a semantic battle,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told reporters last week, adding that “Americans’ biggest concern is inflation” and that they generally feel good about their ability to find and stay employed.
The determination of whether the United States is technically in a recession is usually made by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), which is a private, non-profit research organization based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
A week before the release of the negative GDP report, the White House launched a preemptive blog post denying that two consecutive quarters of falling GDP was the official definition of a recession.
The publication’s author argued that “holistic data” such as “the labor market, consumer and business spending, industrial production and income” figure in the actual definition of a recession.
President Biden last week tried to play down a new report that indicated GDP had contracted for the second quarter in a row.
“Based on these data, it is unlikely that the drop in GDP in the first quarter of this year, even if followed by another drop in GDP in the second quarter, would indicate a recession,” the publication said.
Magness, who has been critical of Biden’s handling of the economy in the past, wrote in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal on July 27 that he accused the White House of “playing words,” rather than addressing the problem. underlying economic problems.
“The White House’s attempt to figure out a recession shows the dangers of politicizing economic terms,” he wrote. “Mr. Biden’s economic advisers are trying to buy time by leveraging the otherwise defensible NBER methodology. They hope that doing so will insulate the administration from electoral backlash in the event of a recession.”
Magness again took aim at the administration on Twitter on Saturday, accusing the White House and the media of hypocrisy.
“Recession. n. 1. 2 consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth when the media doesn’t like the president. 2. A vague, holistic, ill-defined condition that you’re not allowed to talk about until the NBER makes a determination in a year, as long as the media likes the president,” he mockingly wrote.
Nearly 8 in 10 Americans described the U.S. economy as poor and roughly 7 in 10 disapproved of Biden’s economic leadership, according to a June poll by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research .
With post cables