Debunking the debunkers debunk

Who doesn't love a good debunk?

Whether its a debunk in the name of affirming actual truth, or the seedier side of a debunk which only serves personal confirmation bias, to debunk something can not only be as huge matter of immense personal pride in defeating your opponent to the point they may never recover as you stand upon their slain corpse, or as tiny as a well reasoned debate where the truth has finally arrived into the argument and the loser accepts he was wrong its all rather fun and games while the spectacle is being played out.

I was recently struck by a recent even that happened in the US. It became the Citi-bike Karen event.

Important facts to remember

Citi-bikes is a bike sharing scheme in New York. 

There are over 1,000 citi-bike stations

You create an account, scan the barcode on the bike via your phone and leave it at any other Citi-bike station when you've finished it.

Some citi-bikes are electric assisted (which can cause arguments due to their popularity (this is important)

The original story was based around a video of a white pregnant nurse calling for help while sat upon an electric citi-bike while a group of young black men were trying to stop her taking the bike.

The original story was widely reported as a racist white woman trying to steal the bike from a black youth. She was called racist, white supremacist and all the usual language of the far left "antiracist" movement.

But! many thought this story just didn't add up. disregarding skin colour for a moment, many people found it hard to believe that a pregnant woman on her own was going to steal a bike from a group of 5 young men.

And they were right. The lady in question had a receipt on her phone that proves she had scanned for the bike and it was in her possession. which had the anti-racists back-pedalling en masse as one would imagine.

But in comes a TikTok user who goes by the name of Tizzy Ents who claims to have seen receipts that it was, in fact, one of the black fella's who had scanned for the bike, also backed up by the black fella's sister who had also made her own video. Tizzy Ents fancies himself the king of debunks

However. The very strange looking Tizzy Ents (seriously, this guy gives me the creeps) missed one important and very salient point.

The evidence is now in, the argument (of which we only have a short video of that doesn't reveal the whole event) coupled with receipts from both party's gives us all we need to put together what actually happened.

1. Black youth uses the bike, and docks it (giving up possession)

2. White woman see's the available bike 6 mins later scans it and gets on the bike

3. Black youth who was nearby with friends was hoping to also use that bike but had docked it to save money then approaches white Lady and forces her to redock it (as seen in the video) whiles she is still sat on the bike.

4. Black youth then scans the bike for himself and forces the white lady to undock the bike (while she was still sat on it.)

So that's what actually happened, the video and receipts match up, the White lady was in possession of the bike and a group of black youths forced it from her possession (I can imagine why she was scared)

So poor old Tizzy Ents in his desperation to debunk the debunkers, has debunked his own debunk.

Its a sad story and I imagine both parties are completely fed up with the whole saga.

A NEW DEBUNK.

To be honest, I was rather surprised myself to hear that GB News had been named Britain's most loved news brand as they gleefully announced it on their website and bragged about it on their daily shows.

Good for them I thought, whilst I enjoy a lot of stuff on GB News, there is also a lot of it I really dislike. But I checked the article on GB News. The market research company looks to be reputable, and lo and behold! GB News actually is Britain's most loved news brand. Its also rose from 61st to 53rd in the overall media brand table.

But there's always one (actually there is normally more than one) but this "one" has a name, that name is Emma

Emma is a molecular biologist who fights misinformation (presumably only on Twitter)

She had gone to look at the poll itself (to be honest so did I)

The first thing she notices that out of the top media brands GB News is actually ranked at 53. (It had jumped out at her actually) which I thought was odd, because had she read the article on GB News that information was already there.

Then Emma asks a hypothetical (Maybe all the news brands were really unpopular) which is again odd, because the final rankings were given towards the end of the article. At the very beginning of the article it gives a breakdown of top 3 rankings and the categories they fit into. I ask my own hypothetical here. The fact that she missed this suggests a different agenda is being sought here, a nefarious one perhaps.

She then moves on to give readers a "basically what's happening" spiel which can be safely labelled as guff, because anyone who read the report would know what's happening, Emma seems to think the report is somehow gaslighting readers.

She then points out that GB News should really be in the Television category. Well, you could easily argue that is where it should be, but this is not how Savanta (the market research company) works.

They compile and categorise their data on what people "perceive" something as. If the people they polled perceive GB News as a news channel any decent market research company will show this in their findings.

Emma may very well be a molecular biologist, but she clearly doesn't understand how market research works.

Now you could argue that the categorisation is wrong, but this research isn't about that, if you want to argue the case for categorisation then you would need a different poll with very different questions.

But then we get to the final few tweets and things get really bizarre. She encourages people to debunk any GB News tweets boasting about the results of the data (how you can debunk it I'm not quite sure)

And then she tags Ofcom in the hope they get involved because this is a blatant violation of their rules.

(sic) GB News as a news channel is now a commonly accepted thing so Ofcom take some action?

Action against whom? Cant be GB News, they never categorised themselves, cant be Savanta either, they never picked the category. That only leaves the people polled. Now I stand to be corrected but I don't think Ofcom are in charge of what people think.

The replies were pretty revealing as well. Some people really have a raging hatred of GB News, so blinkered in their anger they will literally believe anything spun against them.

For someone who fights against misinformation, I hope Emma is much better when performing her actual job of being a biologist.