TRUE BUT MISLEADING

WORDS BY JESSICA COMSTOCK

Twitter. It’s full of anything and everything: sports results, movie spoilers, breaking news, and “covfefe.” In just the past 10 years, social media, specifically Twitter, has completely transformed the way that politicians communicate with their constituents and the American people. President Trump alone has tweeted over 17,000 times since he announced his campaign for presidency in 2015. Politicians aren’t always truthful, and with the ease of Twitter, they have the ability to say almost anything they want at the tip of their fingers. We found six tweets from prominent political figures and factchecked their statements so you don’t have to.

TRUE BUT MISLEADING

HALF-TRUE

DPR

This was tweeted by Elizabeth Warren on September 5th–a day after the CNN climate change town hall. During the town hall, on the topic of fossil fuel industries, Warren stated, “They want to be able to stir up a lot of controversy around your light bulbs, straws and cheeseburgers, when 70% of the pollution that we’re throwing into the air comes from three industries.”

According to the Environmental Protection Agency’s greenhouse gas emissions research, these sources (transportation, electricity, and commercial/residential) did make up 69% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in 2017. The report also states that agriculture makes up around 9% of emissions and industry makes about 22%.

While her tweet is accurate, her statement at the town hall was inaccurate when it comes to her use of the word “industries.” The EPA research studied not only industries, but individual consumers as well, including activities related to transportation and residential homes. Individual consumers can contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, the EPA cites “efficient fluorescent lighting” as an example of reducing emissions in buildings-- yes, light bulbs.

HALF TRUE

The Trump administration’s fight against Obamacare has had some effects on insurance costs. The 2017 tax reform plan cut the penalty for not having insurance to $0. Without a penalty, insurance companies believed healthy people would opt out of buying insurance. To counteract this predicted loss of revenue, insurance companies increased their premium costs. Sabrina Corlette, director of the Center on Healthcare Insurance Reforms, told NPR that “Insurance companies, in anticipation that consumers would believe that the individual mandate was no longer going to be enforced… priced for that in 2018.” According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, premium prices increased by 32% in 2018, but most were offset with subsidies.

However, Biden’s claim isn’t completely true. Premium prices across the country have been steadily increasing since 1999, according to the 2019 Kaiser Family Foundation Employer Health Benefits Survey. In fact, premium costs increased due to the Affordable Care Act. According to eHealth research, from 2013- 2017, the average premium increase was almost 60%, which is vastly different from 2009-2013 where premium increases were all less than 10% across age groups. Even without Trump, it’s likely that premium costs would have still followed the 20-year-long trend and kept rising.

TRUE

These statistics are from a research paper titled The Long-Run Impacts of Same-Race Teachers published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. This paper, written by researchers at Johns Hopkins University and American University, utilized data from the Tennessee STAR class size reduction experiment. This paper also found that black students who have a black teacher before the end of third grade are also 7% more likely to graduate high school. Another paper published by the NBER, titled Teacher Expectations Matter, shows related research to this topic. This paper found that teachers’ expectations of students increase black students’ chances of graduating from college by 10%. According to the same paper, “white teachers are less optimistic about black students,” and since there are many more white teachers in America than black teachers, this puts black students at a disadvantage.

MOSTLY FALSE

While we can’t know the effects of decriminalizing illegal entry into the United States, there is no strong evidence to show that increased criminal charges in the past 15 years have deterred immigration rates. Title 8, Section 1325 of the United States Federal Code states that anyone who enters or attempts to enter the United States illegally can be fined and/or imprisoned up to 6 months. During the 2020 Democratic primary, multiple candidates have spoken against this law, including Julián Castro, Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg. Most stated that this law is what allows for the Trump administration’s “ZeroTolerance” policy to separate families at the border.

In 2005, the George W. Bush administration introduced Operation Streamline, which increased criminal charges for illegal immigration. Specifically, it sought to reduce rates of illegal re-entry. Until this operation, most who improperly entered the U.S. were not criminally charged, but rather were charged civilly. Due to this operation, criminalization of immigrants at the southern border continued to increase throughout the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations.

However, in 2015, a Department of Homeland Security study reported that Operation Streamline was not effective in turning away illegal immigrants. Even with criminalization of improper entry at the border being law, less than a third of Border Patrol apprehensions are criminally prosecuted, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. Although we can’t predict what would happen if we completely decriminalize illegal entry, research shows that increased criminalization doesn’t decrease the amount of immigration at our southern border.

TRUE BUT MISLEADING

This tweet from Donald Trump went viral with over 33 thousand retweets in October because of the phrase “Impeach the Pres,” which ended up trending worldwide on Twitter. It’s not clear whether this sentence was the result of sarcasm or a typo, but this tweet from Trump has more beyond that one sentence.

First, President Trump claims that median household income is at the highest point ever in the history of the U.S., which is true according to the U.S. Census Bureau. However, this is likely not a direct effect of Trump administration policy–median household income has been increasing since 2014.

Trump also claims that more people are working now than ever, which is true according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. However, just using numbers to measure the success of the labor force is misleading, as it doesn’t account for population growth. The employment-population ratio for September 2019 was 61%, which essentially means that 61% of those of working age are employed. This is not the highest it has ever been–the highest occurred in late 1997 when the ratio hit 67.9%. This dropped dramatically due to the 2008 recession, but has been increasing steadily since 2011.