A reader’s note temporarily attached by Twitter to a claim by President Joe Biden — that “real wages for the average American worker is higher than it was before the pandemic” — said that statement “contains a factual error.”
But it turns out it doesn’t.
The fact check from Twitter’s user-generated “community notes” feature pointed out that the pandemic was declared in mid-March 2020, and that month average hourly “real” wages, meaning they’re adjusted for inflation, were $11.15, a bit higher than the $11.05 wages reported for June of this year.
According to Twitter, community notes are created by user “contributors” to “collaboratively add context to potentially misleading Tweets.” The company says “if enough contributors from different points of view rate that note as helpful,” a note is added beneath a Tweet, but the notes “do not represent Twitter’s viewpoint.”
But economists countered that measuring “before the pandemic” — as Biden put it — would mean comparing January or February 2020 wage data with the most recent month’s. By that measure, real wages were slightly lower pre-pandemic ($10.98 in January 2020 and $11.01 in February 2020) than they are now.
.png.webp)
