Mehdi Hasan, MSNBC host and the author of the ironically named book “Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking” is getting awfully sick of Twitter’s Community Notes—the feature which lets users fact-check and add context to misleading tweets—because they keep catching him spreading misinformation. For a guy who thinks he’s good at debate, he’s really not.
Recently, HBO host Bill Maher pointed out that crime was out of control in places like Chicago, and that the Democratic Party was not doing anything about it and the media was ignoring the issue. In response, on April 28 Hasan tweeted his own claim that white-on-white crime stats are almost identical to black-on-black crime numbers.
He was quickly fact-checked by Community Notes users. Look at the correction posted below his tweet:
"White people kill other white people at almost the same rate black people kill other black people & yet you never hear anyone complaining about 'white on white crime'. These aren't points of sage wisdom from Maher. They are classic racist dog whistles."pic.twitter.com/VZlCoqfet9
— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) April 28, 2023
The context added by readers referred to FBI statistics—which did not back up Hasan’s claims:
The rate of black-on-black killings (53.38/million) was ~5.3x higher than that of white-on-white (10.03/million) in the U.S. in 2019, according to data from the FBI and the Census Bureau. Black killers killed 89% of black victims. White killers killed 79% of white victims.
Many other users piled on to let the anchor know that his numbers were skewed and that he was focusing on only facts that supported his narrative. One poster wrote, “You could get a job as a farm hand since you’re so good at cherry picking.” Another pointed out the statistical sleight of hand that Hasan was using to try to make crime seem equally distributed across racial categories.
*Rate* and *frequency* are two very different things, @mehdirhasan, and you know this. Which is why nearly 50% of homicide victims or black despite representing only 14% of the population.
You are a professional liar. https://t.co/DkiJkuXKfo pic.twitter.com/fAODg8zGKe
— Viva Frei (@thevivafrei) April 28, 2023
Ouch.
Hasan was not pleased that people didn’t take his MSNBC/Democrat Party talking points as gospel and lashed out, saying it was all a MAGA plot:
If you had any doubt that @CommunityNotes has become another weapon of the right on Musk’s Twitter, see the BS community note added to my Bill Maher clip, after MAGA folks demanded it. It makes a point that is irrelevant to the one I am making (re intraracial ‘rates* of killing.) pic.twitter.com/GXZrli4Lx9
— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) April 29, 2023
The hysterical thing here is, he gets corrected again, this time for his false depiction of Community Notes:
Community Notes doesn’t work by majority rules. To identify notes that are helpful to a wide range of people, notes require agreement between contributors who have sometimes disagreed in their past ratings. This helps prevent one-sided ratings.
Hasan might want to think about quitting Twitter. It clearly doesn’t work well for him.
Bill Maher is an interesting and confounding fellow. Although he’s a known liberal who’s made many offensive comments in the past, in recent years he’s sounded a surprisingly conservative tone in some of his remarks. He’s absolutely right to point out that crime has spiraled out of control in the U.S., much of it in inner cities, and that black-on-black crime is a serious issue. For every high-profile grisly murder that makes the front page of the New York Post, there are 15 other shootings on almost any given weekend in Chicago—and many of them involve young black men as both victims and perpetrators. The FBI statistics that Community Notes referenced above are a sobering reminder of this fact.
If you don’t believe me, take a look at this report from Chi-town filed May 1, 2023: “At least 27 people have been shot, five fatally, in gun violence across Chicago this weekend, police said.” The races of the victims, some as young as 16, were not reported, but multiple previous incidents have shown that a large number of these shootings are gang-related and consist of black youths shooting other black youths. But it’s not any one race that’s at issue—crime as a whole is the dilemma.
You can’t solve a problem if you refuse to acknowledge it, and the failure of the media and the Democrats to even admit reality means that more dead people will continue to pile up on the sidewalks. Hasan can play ” see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil,” but it won’t make the plague go away.
Many have said that Elon Musk is ruining Twitter, but for my part, I am loving the “Community Notes” feature.
More Hasan:
Musk Makes Mincemeat of Medhi Hasan for His Meltdown Over the GOP and Midterms
More Lefty Meltdowns in ‘Blue Check War’ as Elon Owns Them Bad
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