please stop believing things on twitter

there is a twitter post going around about a guy in the US removing his own wisdom tooth at age 22 by torrenting a dental textbook and using mexican novocaine

this is fake; I sent this to a dentist I know to fact-check it.

(1) you would not be able to obtain leverage for the physical movement of removal

(2) most 22 year olds would need to have the teeth surgically cut/removed; he would not have those tools

(3) it could be possible if the 22 year old had severe periodontal disease, but at that age this is virtually impossible

(4) people do remove their own teeth, but this is when the tooth is already extremely loose

(5) by the time the 22 year old acquired pliers, syringes, elevators and so forth, they might as well have paid for the operation themselves

(6) in the US, dental textbooks don't use novocaine; they use lidocaine or articaine, which one would know if they read a dental textbook

(7) what might have happened: some patients claim to have removed a tooth, but they have in fact yanked on the crown of a heavily decayed tooth that is soft and snapped the crown off, leaving the root inside. this may be misconstrued as tooth removal. it is "surprisingly common."

and the answer to "has this well-circulated image received a fact-check label by moderators" is "absolutely not."

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here’s another egregious example about oxytocin, and was shared by internet veterans who are both educated enough to exercise rigor and experienced enough in the unreliability of anonymity to know better: https://imgur.io/a/WOXnT7E

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notice how everything wrong with this does not easily fit into 140 characters. communicating the entirety of why this is fake would require an entire tweet thread, which no one is going to read. if someone posts a blatant lie, you don’t have room for corrections. you have room for "omg wow" and "awesome" and "holy shit bro". this is WORSE than having no room for any discussion at all, and on tiktok or instagram you don’t have room for a conversation. on twitter, you have just enough room to communicate a lie, but not enough to correct one.

and once people have circulated misinformation, they're reluctant to admit it's misinformation. it's obvious why this is -- hardly anyone is dandy about believing they've spread false info. nonetheless, a person correcting this kind of misinformation has ton to overcome not just the false information itself but the ego investment of others too.

this is why twitter fosters misinformation, and why it's not good as a discussion platform.