#data manipulation

Overcast, some bullshit.

LMAO. When Grok got too woke, Elon had his minions at Twitter alter the algorithm to make it not include Musk and Trump.

Twitter is a propaganda + disinformation machine owned by an authoritarian, Nazi-saluting, Apartheid-loving snowflake.

Sue sobbed as she entered her patient’s personal information into the state website: Date of birth, county of residence, last menstrual period. The Texas Department of Health and Human Services even wanted to know whether the woman was married, and how many children she had.

“Reporting every detail of that woman’s information, the fact that I was putting any of it in...it was devastating to me as a physician,” she says.

Sue, a pseudonym, is an emergency medicine physician at a major Texas city hospital. Ever since Roe was overturned and the state’s trigger law went into effect, Sue and other Texas doctors have been required to submit patients’ private medical information into a state-run website without their knowledge or consent—adhering to a mandate that forces them to report women as suffering from abortion complications even when they’re not.

This rarely reported on section of Texas law lists 28 medical issues as abortion complications—conditions that reproductive health experts point out often have nothing to do with abortion. Still, doctors are required to tell the state about any woman who develops one of these issues if she happens to have had an abortion at any point in her life. 

Doctors who don’t make these reports can be fined for each ‘violation’; after three violations, they could lose their license. Sue, who got conflicting and often confusing guidance from the large health system that runs her hospital and dozens of others in the state, was terrified not to comply. “For all I knew, I could be one that [Attorney General] Ken Paxton made an example of,” she says. 

This reporting mandate is a central and insidious part of Republicans’ strategy to paint abortion as dangerous despite decades of evidence to the contrary. It’s a policy that forces doctors, under threat of losing their license, to lend their name and medical credibility to the collection of false data—‘research’ that will be used by the state to claim abortion is unsafe.

“They want to force us to report a complication so they can submit and advertise bad data,” Sue says. 

The list of ‘complications’ that Texas doctors are forced to attribute to abortion are vague and nonsensical. Some, like “adverse reactions to anesthesia,” are risks associated with having any medical procedure. (As Sue points out, it’s not as if there’s a state commission on adverse reactions to colonoscopies.) 

Others, like “infection,” could develop in a patient for a reason completely unrelated to abortion or predate the procedure, yet would still be counted as a complication. The law also lists complications like “pelvic inflammatory disease,” which is a type of infection and therefore could be double-counted.

Other ‘complications’ would require reports to the state yearsafter a patient had an abortion. I’ll use myself as an example: My daughter was born three months early after I developed severe preeclampsia. If I delivered her in Texas tomorrow, and happened to mention that I ended a pregnancy a few years previous, my doctor would be required toreport my daughter’s early birth as a complication of abortion. Never mind that there’s no link between preeclampsia and abortion; because “preterm delivery in subsequent pregnancies” is on the law’s list of reportable conditions, my physician would have no choice. 

What’s more, it wouldn’t be just one doctor reporting my supposed complication to the state. Texas law requires that every single physician involved in a patient’s care fill out the state’s abortion complication form. Even the hospital itself, as an entity, has to file a report. It’s a policy that encourages double, triple, even quadruple duplicate reports for a single person. (Again, a patient who may not have an abortion complication at all!)

So in this hypothetical where I’ve given birth in Texas, I’d be under the impression that I’m at the hospital to deliver a baby and get treatment for preeclampsia. But something very different is happening behind the scenes: The birth of my daughter is being recorded, reported, and counted three or four times as proof that abortion is dangerous—‘data’ that will be published in Texas’ annual abortion complication report.

And though Texas’ law on abortion reporting says that the annual report “may not include any duplicative data,” Dr. Ushma Upadhyay, professor and public health scientist at the University of California, San Francisco, tells me there’s no real way to prevent such a thing. “There’s no guidance or standards,” she says. 

The state’s abortion complication form doesn’t include a patient’s name, or any unique identifier, for officials to cross reference. Even if the health department managed to match another piece of information, like date of birth, with multiple reports coming in on the same day from the same hospital, there’s another issue: That same patient’s data will be counted again if she sees another doctor down the line, months or even years later.

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