Thread by @Yascha_Mounk

This New Yorker article claims two in three young Americans who come to the emergency room were injured by police. The same sentence claims two in three young people are there because of car accidents.

1) The claim is on its face ridiculous.

2) That would make... four thirds.

The New Yorker has the most thorough fact-checking in the business. I once had to provide a ticket to prove the claim that I traveled a twenty mile distance by train rather than some other mode of transportation.

So how does this happen? Are some claims simply sacrosanct now?

Here's the source, by @Louise_M_Perry.

According to her best approximation, the true rate of young people in the emergency room because of police violence is 0.2%, not 66.6%.

Reforming the police is urgent. But scaring people with misinformation is bad.

unherd.com/thepost/an-unt…

Ok, so the second half of the sentence could be talking about the *overall* number of people hit by motor vehicles.

But that doesn't fix the underlying problem: the patently false claim that two thirds of young Americans in the emergency room are there due to police violence.

Btw, I don't blame the writer, whom I admire immensely. We all get things wrong.

But what we get wrong, and which claims fact-checkers find so plausible that they don't do their due diligence, is very telling.

And however bad the actual facts, making people paranoid is... bad.