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Notes -
This tweet by UN Women.
I am still confused as to whether this tweet is a sincere sentiment felt by someone somewhere or an A/B tested string designed to be maximally infuriating/alienating to the largest number of people.
Here is my dissection as to why this tweet is especially infuriating.
No mention of base rates. Which would be a crucial piece of information to parse such a statistic. FYI, women tend to make up ~40% of journalists.
(Probably intentionally) misleading the usage of a ratio instead of a percentage. A percentage is a meaningful statistic when comparing a rate change of something. If x journalists were killed in t year, and x+a journalists were killed in t+1 year, you could say that the "more journalists were killed, a increase of b %"
Instead have a look at the numbers.
2020: 62 journalists killed (58 men, 4 women).
2021: 55 journalists killed (49 men, 6 women).
This is textbook 101, lying with statistics. Less JOURNALISTS were killed. Unless you don't care if male journalists are killed. Bonus: They calculated the percentages wrong (: - They rounded down so.. thanks for the fig leaf?
No regard for as to whether this change is "statistically significant" (FYI, well within less than 1 stddev).
Just goes without saying, the tone-deafness of it. Why not "𝐒𝐓𝐎𝐏 𝐓𝐀𝐑𝐆𝐄𝐓𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐉𝐎𝐔𝐑𝐍𝐀𝐋𝐈𝐒𝐓𝐒"?
The childish assumption that people who LITERALLY KILL JOURNALISTS will be swayed in any way whatsoever even with a LOUD proclamation of "Don't do bad thing!".
Now jaded you might say "but this is the CW, this is what always happens and will continue to happen". I agree.
In the landscape of twitter/msm only the most ragebait of headlines grab any attention, however I would say that a lot of that ragebait can be just made by applying the principles of making the best clickbait, and they might occur to someone with a certain creative bent naturally.
This tweet on the other hand isn't mere creative distortion. It has all the trappings of being intentionally crafted. Think of it this way. Someone had to go through the statistics of various professions deaths by gender, probably something like;
SELECT occupation FROM occupational_deaths WHERE 2021 > 2020 AND gender LIKE 'Female' GROUPBY occupation;and "journalist' was the only field that returned.
That is just especially hilarious to me.. The best trolls of our generation might not be 4channers but instead working for various corporate activist organizations.
As to whether this tweet is a product of gross incompetence or malicious competence is going to remain a great mystery. Duck test is certainly not working here.
Duck test?
"If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck."
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