THREAD: One of the problems with Twitter (& social media in general) is not only users who post false info but the thousands of others who signal boost the false info by retweeting it. Animation history discourse suffers greatly from this. An egregious recent example:

This person (identity blacked out) builds up an utterly garbage argument by claiming that the strike at Disney in 1941"failed." That is actually the exact opposite of what happened. /2

The Disney strike was, in fact, the single most successful labor action in U.S. (and arguably global) animation history. Its had immediate and widespread effects on the industry. There is no debate about its success among any Hollywood or animation historian. /3

Further, the reason that unionized LA industry artists TODAY have the highest standard of labor rights in the animation world is a direct result of the '41 strike. /4 https://www.cartoonbrew.com/artist-rights/day-75-years-ago-disney-animation-changed-forever-140103.html

Don't even know where to begin with the 2nd tweet in the original screengrab. The Disney strike didn't lead to the Red Scare. That's a conflation of 2 separate historical events. Disney is at best a minor footnote in the overall history of the "Red Scare" aka McCarthyism. /5

This person also claims there was a "bleeding out of talent" that followed the Red Scare, which again is entirely untrue. There was no second wave of talent who left Disney after Walt testified in front of HUAC in 1947. /6

Bottomline: Listen to the people who have proven expertise on a topic. And don't retweet a rando's fabricated animation history more than 5K times! Twitter works best when we all make a personal effort to prevent the spread of misinformation. /end