Thread by @dctrjack

Now that we've monkeyed around... Let's go over this @IGN tweet, as a good example of how nonsense spreads. Curtain pulled back stuff 🪄

On Saturday, co-founder/pres of @neuralink, @max_hodak tweeted the exact words IGN quote in this tweet. He started his sentence with "we"...

Hodak is the president of Neuralink so, some assume "we" is referring to his business, I guess. But the job isn't to just rehash some dude's tweet -- it's to actually ask the Q.

The story popped up in a few places early, like Futurism.
futurism.com/the-byte/neura…

Futurism's article is from Tuesday and it's short/sweet. Doesn't have anything to do with Neuralink's tech.

But on Wednesday, the New York Post wrote about this story, as did other tabloids like The Sun. They just went and assumed Hodak was talking about the company though??

Then on Thursday, @thehill got on board. Part of this is probably because Musk is such a big draw for SEO -- people search for him a lot, and you can get a lot of readers to your site if you're on top of the Musk Expanded Universe (MEU). That's just the way the internet works.

So you get a bunch of articles that see the Elon ~news~ and just rehash the article they've read -- like IGN. There's no indication the site (or the NYP/Sun/Hill) has done the leg work to reach out. It's just recycling the old stuff. Misinformation at hyperspeed.

it galls me that IGN tweets out the story and it gets a lot of love. A lie spreads faster than the truth and all that. Even though the headline is wrong.

Ofc, it doesn't matter because hey <3 and RTs baby!!

Once is fine, forgivable...
But doubling down with a second tweet where the information isn't corrected is deliberately misleading.

I would love more and more people to engage with science and sci-comm, but just writing science because it gets you some clicks hurts everybody.

I'd particularly love @IGN, which has such a broad audience, to cover science! Doing so would improve interest, engagement, literacy and maybe even things like women in STEM initiatives. The audience would broaden. There's a lot of cool knock on effects.

IGN calls science a "core topic" but are there any in-house writers trained to pick apart the intricacies? The track record isn't good. This completely false story also did the rounds, after a rehash from a NYP story.

It's frustrating too that the "any press is good press" type attitude comes from places like Neuralink. They could quickly kill the misinformation by saying "this isn't true" or Hodak could tweet something else, but they let it slide. And now it's everywhere. Gotta be better.

Now there's a ton of people who think Elon Musk's brain-implant startup has the tech to build Jurassic Park and fill it with exotic species. They don't. Carn.