Meta’s fact-checkers for Facebook and Instagram are siding with President Biden in a major policy debate, flagging posts that accuse the administration of changing the definition of recession as “false information.”
With the midterm elections looming, the White House and its critics are in a fierce public relations battle over whether the U.S. economy’s two straight quarters of GDP decline — historically a benchmark closely tied to the onset of a recession — technically meets the formal definition set by economists.
Reason magazine reported on two posts — one from each of the social media platforms — that PolitiFact, Meta’s third-party fact checker, had tagged claiming they contained “partly false information. Checked by independent fact-checkers.”
Both of the posts use screenshots of the White House blog post from July 21 that reads: “While some maintain that two consecutive quarters of falling real GDP constitute a recession, that is neither the official definition nor the way economists evaluate the state of the business cycle.”
The Instagram post is from conservative podcaster Grant Allen, who mocks the blog post by asking Siri what a recession is.
The built-in iPhone artificial intelligence service told him that a recession is “a period of temporary economic decline during which trade and industrial activity are reduced, generally identified by a fall in GDP in two successive quarters.”
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