“Seniors have gotten the biggest increase in their pensions in 10 years under President Biden’s leadership,” the official White House account tweeted.
But the social network added a mention to the message, specifying that pensions are indexed to the rate of inflation, according to a 1972 law ratified by Richard Nixon (a Republican president).
The initial tweet, which has since been deleted, was “not complete” and lacked “context,” admitted White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre.
Twitter’s background notes are written by independent contributors to the Birdwatch program, a bluebird social network initiative to combat misinformation, and are backed up by relevant posts if enough different people find them “helpful.”
“This means the algorithm takes into account not only how many contributors rated a note ‘Helpful’ or ‘Not Helpful,’ but also whether the people who rated it represent different perspectives,” Twitter explained in a statement on Oct. 6, when the Californian company launched this program in the United States.
“The community note system is great,” Elon Musk, the new owner of the social network, reacted on Wednesday in response to a user who shared a screenshot of the deleted tweet along with the context note.
“Our goal is to make Twitter the most accurate source of information in the world, regardless of political affiliation,” added the South African-American billionaire.
Musk, the richest man in the world and boss in addition to the Tesla and SpaceX companies, bought the influential Twitter platform last Thursday, after six months of comings and goings and tensions with many users, managers of the social network (now fired) and NGOs.
Musk advocates less strict content moderation than the current one, he says, to promote more freedom of expression.
The American right, which considers itself censored on major social networks, approves of this view. But its critics believe that the limits established by the regulations, which prohibit harassment, hate speech and disinformation in particular, do not prevent useful debates from being generated.
