Warning: partisan politics. Cognitive candy. I don't expect this to be consequentially useful on its own. I'm just really curious about something wild.
The fully expanded, less clickbaity question in more than four words: Did U.S. presidential primary candidate Robert F. Kennedy post neo-Nazi symbols as a dogwhistle on Twitter?
Here is the tweet motivating my question:
Notice the use of the numbers "14" and "88". If you don't know, the numbers "1488" together are neo-Nazi symbols.
The quote tweet that brought my attention to this. The person said they used to take down a lot of t-shirts (on a t-shirt store site?) that were subtly encoding these numbers, such as in the prices of the shirt, and that this tweet was setting off his alarm bells.
The confluence of coincidences was too much to have a plausible alternative explanation in a Bayesian world. These movements explicitly tell their members to do this shit, find ways to obscure the symbology. We shouldn’t be surprised when they do it.
I am just kind of shocked that this could be the case. Like, what the fuck. He's not even a Republican. We're talking about a Kennedy here! Does society make any sense anymore?
My error bars are high here. I would think it's likely it's a coincidence. But also, I don't know, this seems to me to be at least 10% likely to be true!? RFK has been criticized for making commentary that is considered to be antisemitic as well as being an antivaxxer. He seems to believe his father and uncle were assassinated by the CIA, which, whether or not is true, could certainly lead to anti-establishment views and paranoid epistemology. I take a lot of the claims against him to be clearly politically motivated interpretations of statements of his, and I haven't examined it all that much, but they're still likely some positive evidence that increases the likelihood he would espouse or at least pander to a neo-Nazi view compared to not holding those views.
If it's true it's a dogwhistle, the most likely hypothesis could be that a campaign staffer posted it instead of RFK himself. Apparently a staffer on the DeSantis campaign retweeted a video with Nazi symbology in it before it was taken down and that staffer fired. But this tweet hasn't been taken down, edited, or clarified yet.
I just feel surprised. You can't unsee the possible guileful intentions. It drives up the dopamine in my gossiping ape brain to assess this. But it could very well be a numerical coincidence as well.
We figured out did at least okay on the Amanda Knox case; can we get to the bottom of this and derive a community estimate of the chance it was intentional? If you have nothing better to do, anyway.
Loads of sub-questions for consideration in producing an estimate: What is the prior probability of someone using these two numbers naturally vs intentionally on Twitter (particularly when a politician running for office)? For that matter, how many two-or-more-co-occurring 2-digit numbers are posted to Twitter each day in total? How many co-occurrences of those two-digit numbers happen by coincidence each day? How many people use it intentionally each day? How many intentional uses are caught? How many people accuse people of intentional use when it was actually coincidence? What is the probability he previously knows the meaning? What is the probability of someone being a neo-Nazi conditional on being an avowed antivaxxer? What other bits of evidence are there about his ideology? How likely is it a closet neo-Nazi or someone who sympathizes with such would take pro-Jewish actions or make pro-Jewish statements? Why has the tweet not been acted on yet? What is the probability a staffer made this tweet? How many politicians hold neo-Nazi sympathies?
Some commentary elsewhere: