The editor of Vox was caught over the holiday retweeting a tweet which included a news article that had been completely debunked by Harvard researchers.
According to The Daily Caller:
“We found that counties that had hosted a 2016 Trump campaign rally saw a 226 percent increase in reported hate crimes over comparable counties that did not host such a rally.” https://t.co/zy0093lPoH
— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) December 31, 2019
Vox founder and editor-at-large Ezra Klein capped off his year by spreading misleading information in a viral tweet Tuesday.
Klein tweeted out a nine-month-old Washington Post article stating counties that hosted Trump rallies saw massive spikes in hate crimes compared to counties that didn’t host Trump rallies. Klein’s tweet garnered more than 7,000 retweets and more than 14,000 likes by Wednesday afternoon.
But what Klein didn’t tell his 2.5 million followers was that the article was based on a study that was thoroughly debunked months prior by researchers at Harvard University.
…
When Lilley and Wheaton tried to replicate the original study, they found that “adding a simple statistical control for county population to the original analysis causes the estimated effect of Trump rallies on reported hate incidents to become statistically indistinguishable from zero.”
The improper study actually would have shown that Hillary Clinton rallies increased hate crime more than Trump, but this article never looked at that.
“Using additional data we collected, we also analyzed the effect of Hillary Clinton’s campaign rallies using the identical statistical framework. The ostensible finding: Clinton rallies contribute to an even greater increase in hate incidents than Trump rallies.”
— Vince Coglianese (@VinceCoglianese) December 31, 2019
