I'm growing a bit tired of repeating the same point over and over in regard to the recent paper by John Cook and Stephan Lewandowsky (that they repeatdly call things contradictions even though they are not), so I decided it would be a good time to take a break and discuss something else that has been bugging me. You guys may remember this tweet:
Which wasn't actually written by Barack Obama or by anyone representing him. The group using his name for the Twitter account is Oragnizing for Action, a non-profit advocacy group which explicitly denies any affiliation with any government. When asked, "Is OFA affiliated in any way with the federal or any other government, or funded with taxpayer dollars," it says, "No."
Combined with the fact the account's profile says:
This account is run by Organizing for Action staff. Tweets from the President are signed -bo.
It should be clear President Obama had nothing to do with this tweet. Despite that, John Cook wrote this in his doctoral thesis:
Consequently, our study received a significant amount of media attention, including a number of tweets by President Obama (Cook, Bedford, & Mandia, 2014).
For today's post, I would like to discuss whether or not this was a lie.
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