Did the Biden Administration Really Open Up the U.S. Border Floodgates to Allow Immigrants In?
Recently a video on social media of the U.S. border floodgates, in Tucson Arizona, opening started garnering attention. The video claims that the Biden administration purposefully opened up these gates under the guise of flooding to allow illegal immigrants into our country. Of course these are really bold claims and can even be cause for legal trouble for Biden and his team. But as most things are on social media, this is completely false.
A big fact that the original poster omitted from his original post is that these floodgates are opened every year! You see, the area can experience rough flooding during its monsoon season that can cause a lot of environmental damage to the area. To combat this U.S. Customs and Border Control open up the floodgates to try and prevent this from happening.
This has happened during many other presidential candidates time in office but once it happens to one you don't like, you start to not think of reason. Instead people would focus on trying to find the bad out of a situation and use social media to spread it like wildfire.
It didn't help that Senator Ted Cruz also shared this video exclaiming the same lies everyone else was. His caption for the post states, "The Biden administration welded open the Trump border wall in Tucson, AZ. It’s not a crisis. It’s by design."
This is another classic example of social media running wild with false news. Well over 100,000 users got riled up over completely nothing. All of this could've been avoided if our citizens just did a little bit of research.
Hi Max, I really like your blog post and that you aren't exposing politicians based on political part affiliation. I wasn't aware about this story, but I can't say I'm surprised. Often, I think that people like to use controversial topics like immigration to garner attention no matter how skewed they have to make the story. The fact that these floodgates are opened every year, but somehow social media decided make a false narrative by taking a video out of context is frustrating. Spreading false information can misinform citizens and cause unnecessary frustration, like with this post talked about.
ReplyDeleteHi Max, I saw so many posts about this exact thing this past week. On one hand I can't believe some people fall for these lies, but on the other hand, I am really not surprised at all. People are lazy and even though a quick search gave me this article: https://www.factcheck.org/2023/09/posts-misrepresent-use-of-floodgates-at-southern-border/ most people can't seem to be bothered. Misinformation spreads on social media faster than it can be contained and when "people in the know" also repost this misinformation it makes it even more difficult to contain. The more misinformation I see the more I find myself going through possible solutions and keep coming back to media accountability.
ReplyDeleteGreat summary of what's going on! I like that you pointed out how important it is to check facts in this age of fast information sharing. Your point of view shows how false information gets around and what could happen if people don't do their research. As you said, it's important not to let emotionally charged posts sway you without first checking the facts. Your post is a good way to remember that. Well-written and full of good ideas!
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