Meta’s third-party fact-checkers have flagged as “false information” posts on Instagram and Facebook accusing the Biden administration of changing the definition of a recession in order to deny that the U.S. economy has entered one. This is yet another reminder that the project of purportedly independent fact-checking on social media is a highly partisan one, in which legitimately debatable opinions are passed off as objective truth. Last week, the White House published an online article disputing the standard definition of an economic recession: i.e., two consecutive fiscal quarters in which GDP growth was negative. “Both official determinations of recessions and economists’ assessment of economic…
Author: Robby Soave
Robby Soave
Robby Soave is a senior editor at Reason. He enjoys writing about culture, politics, education policy, criminal justice reform, television, and video games. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Daily Beast, U.S. News & World Report, The Orange County Register, and The Detroit News.
On Saturday, newly minted Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, declared an end to mask mandates in the state’s public schools; parents may now decide whether their children should wear masks. Youngkin’s executive order has been met with furious opposition from public schools. Several districts—including Arlington and Alexandria City Public Schools, which both neighbor D.C.—vowed to openly defy the order, receiving encouragement from White House press secretary Jen Psaki. In response, the governor said he would pursue all legal options to compel schools to let parents decide the mask issue on an individual basis. There is good reason to move away from district-wide mask mandates. In…
Earlier this year, schools around the country received more than a hundred billion dollars from the federal government—American taxpayers, in truth—in order to recover from the pandemic and finally get back to the task of teaching kids. The feds stipulated that 20 percent of that money be put toward addressing learning losses during the pandemic, but the bulk of it can be spent at schools’ discretion. Which means, of course, that many schools are using this sudden injection of cash to make improvements that have nothing to do with keeping COVID-19 at bay. “Some districts are investing big money in…
A viral Instagram post claimed that COVID-19 is 99 percent survivable for most age groups—the elderly being an important exception. The post cited projections from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), but was flagged as misinformation by the social media site and rated “false” by the Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact. That’s a curious verdict, since the underlying claim is likely true. While estimates of COVID-19’s infection fatality rate (IFR) range from study to study, the expert consensus does indeed place the death rate at below 1 percent for most age groups. PolitiFact is correct that the CDC’s September 2020 modeling projections should not be…