With elections coming up, there is much conversation on the candidates. On February 19, there was a democratic debate that took place in Las Vegas, Nevada. Bernie Sanders presented a tax proposal that caught a lot of attention on social media.
The “grandmother” who I came across on Facebook is actually a gentleman who is from one of my old apartment complex’s in Los Angeles. He was arguing against Bernie Sanders. Because he has now deleted this post, I can not directly quote him, but I have pulled some images from the internet that were used in the conversation.
This is the image he posted:
He claimed that the tax proposal was not going to work because of these numbers. By the time I got to the conversation, there had already been some debate. Because I choose to keep my political views to myself, my contribution was simply this article from Snopes.com which rates this claim as “False”. Not that this makes it more or less valid, but I did receive a few likes on my post.
Furthermore, someone posted the real tax levels:
This clearly shows that someone who makes $29,000 per year is NOT going to be taxed at 52%, but a closer to reasonable 15%.
This conversation as a whole was not hostile, but very informational. Sure there were occasional comments that may have been read in a snarky tone, but for the most part, everyone was on the side of spreading accurate numbers and news. That said, JJ did not have much to say, as he deleted this post after being proven wrong. He did not respond individually, but posted a new Facebook thread which apologized and recognized the backfire he received. He clarified that he wanted to spread awareness about voting based off of feelings vs. logic.
So all-in-all, yes I believe this was successful in the name of media literacy. However, no, it was not a true conversation. There was not much back and forth or discussion, but it stopped the spread of a falsified claim about Bernie Sanders’ tax proposal.
