LogFAQs > #933664543

So I feel like a lot of these gotcha style Twitter posts attacking arguments made by the Trump legal team out of context or praising points made by others (also out of context) show the problem with social media generally. People get an incredibly distorted view of the arguments being made because they are being shown little curated tidbits, presented with a heavy gloss of editorial bias by the person making the tweet.

It's not hard to make a nuanced argument look ridiculous by selectively choosing a 140-character window and omitting what comes before and after (and beyond that, the context provided by 800 years of precedent and legal theory in the US, UK, and England). But I feel like people on the left actually believe that these Twitter posts constitute effective refutations of arguments made by the Trump lawyers. And bad media outlets are happy to engage in the same kind of bad journalism, to a somewhat lesser extent than people on Twitter.

I think this is a serious problem that society needs to deal with. It's gotten quite serious because we're now at the point where actual intelligent people believe everything they read on Twitter without independent verification.

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September 1, 2003; November 4, 2007; September 2, 2013
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