Even though it is often hard to tell if Joe Biden means, or knows, what he is saying when he speaks in public, one would assume that whoever runs his Twitter account for him realizes that outright misinformation will be challenged. Even so, the president’s official account tweeted out a whopper on Sunday which led to rapid rebukes.
Biden made the misleading claim in a post that the “most common price at gas stations across the country is $3.19 per gallon.” The post added: “That’s progress.”
The average price of gas is $3.80 and it’s going to go up.
It’s part of Biden’s pledge to intentionally destroy American energy. https://t.co/c2x9x9AAnU
— Sen. Marsha Blackburn (@MarshaBlackburn) November 7, 2022
The average price of a gallon of gas nationwide stands at $3.80 according to AAA.
Twitter has become more responsive in adding clarifications to misleading posts since Elon Musk took over control of the platform last month. Based on user feedback, Twitter added an insert at the bottom of the Biden account post.
The note is titled “Readers added context they thought people might want to know,” and shows that Biden was actually pointing to the “mode” gas price as opposed to the average.
As a statistical term of art, “mode” refers to the most commonly occurring number in a collection of statistics. In other words, it may be accurate that when looking at the price of gas at all U.S. stations, $3.19 occurs more often than any other price number. Using mode as a metric diminishes the impact of high gas prices on the average retail cost.
Georgia and Texas are the only American states that currently have average gas prices that are at or lower than the $3.19 statistic cited by Biden.
When comparing apples to apples, the average cost of a gallon of gas is now around $1.41 more than when Biden took office. Even when comparing the “mode” price today to that from January 2021, the price is about 80 cents higher now.
Even liberal CNN issued a scathing fact-check on a wild Biden claim about gas prices from late last month. It described a claim Biden made on October 27 about gas prices to be outright “false.”
Biden said at that time “the most common price of gas in America is $3.39 – down from over $5 when I took office.”
CNN declared that statement “isn’t even close to true.” Both the mode price and the average price stood at $2.39 on January 20, 2021, as Biden was sworn in.
The left-leaning outlet determined that Biden was attempting to make it appear gas prices have gone down significantly since he assumed office, but in reality “they have actually increased significantly.”
