Translation: My factually incorrect statement went viral so I’m not taking it down.

So, Israel was trending on twitter, and a lot of that messaging was centered on the idea that the stimulus bill was providing $600 for Americans but $500M from Israel. Sounds bad, not not accurate.

A good chunk of that traffic was driven by Bragman's original tweet, which, between the combination of the blue check and screenshots of appropriations language looks pretty persuasive. It's at about 15K RTs and another 8K quote tweets right now. So, why is this wrong?

As explained in this thread, Congress passed multiple stuff today - a COVID relief bill, plus lots of other stuff including DOD spending and overseas aid. The other stuff features recurring spending that would have occured anyway. https://twitter.com/Yair_Rosenberg/status/1341131902854590474?s=20

It's both technically wrong and substantively misleading to create the impression that Israel was getting $500M at the expense of other items in the stimulus bill.

Later "clarifications" that are not really clarifications: "its a distinction without a difference."

No it's not.

The overseas/military funding was the result of completely separate negotiation processes from the COVID bill.

Sure, at some very abstract level, spending more money on guns means less money on butter. But a) those tradeoffs have been largely inoperable during the pandemic and before - there has been no fiscal belt-tightening, and b) that is true of all spending so why highlight Israel?

There is lots to complain about the stimulus or spending generally w/o misleading people. Maybe too much to label this as misinformation, but it directs people to a false and negative conclusion about both the process and substantive outcomes of how their government works.

Final point: we all love the rush of a viral tweet. But if you want to have a reputation for sharing fact-based information, that means deleting the occasional tweet and acknowledging error rather than digging in even when all your instincts say do the opposite.

Apparently there is a whole genre of outraged tweeting about stuff that is not actually in the COVID bill https://twitter.com/NGrossman81/status/1341229160103088128?s=20