Can Differences in ‘Misinformation’ Sharing Explain Political Disparities in Social Media Suspensions?
“Based on an analysis of posting behavior and subsequent suspensions on Twitter, Oxford Internet Institute professor Mohsen Mosleh and four other researchers confirmed that Republicans and conservatives were much more likely to run afoul of moderators than Democrats and progressives were. But they also found that right-leaning social media users were much more likely to share information from “low-quality news sites.” Those findings, the authors say, suggest that “differences in misinformation sharing can lead to politically asymmetric sanctions.”
I know what you’re thinking: Since “misinformation” is a vague, subjective, and highly contested category, it can easily serve as a cover for bias against particular opinions or ideologies. But Mosleh et al. took that possibility into account by judging the quality of news sites based on “trustworthiness ratings” by a nationally representative and “politically balanced” sample of 970 Republicans and Democrats. They also considered how sites ranked when they were rated only by the Republicans.”
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“Mosleh et al. found further evidence that “the tendency to share misinformation” is politically skewed when they analyzed data from seven other sources, including information about “YouGov respondents’ on-platform Facebook sharing in 2016,” “prolific respondents’ on-platform Twitter sharing in 2018,” and “the on-platform sharing of Twitter users sampled in various ways in 2021.” And again, that association was apparent based on the “politically balanced” trustworthiness assessments as well as “fact-checker ratings.”
These results are consistent with previous research, Mosleh et al. say. They cite studies finding that “links to websites that journalists and fact-checkers deemed to be low-quality ‘fake news’ sites were shared much more by conservatives than liberals on Facebook” during the 2016 election and the 2020 election and on Twitter during the 2016 election and during Donald Trump’s first impeachment.
Other studies have found that “conservatives on Twitter were much more likely to follow elites [who] made claims fact-checkers rated as false compared with Democrats” and that “Republican-oriented images on Facebook were much more likely to be rated as misleading than Democratic-oriented images.” Mosleh et al. also note evidence from surveys that “present participants with politically balanced sets of headlines,” which “typically find that conservatives indicate higher sharing intentions for articles deemed to be false by professional fact-checkers than liberals.”
Such associations can be seen in other countries as well as the United States. “A survey experiment conducted in 16 countries found widespread cross-cultural evidence of conservatives sharing more unambiguously false claims about COVID-19 than liberals,” Mosleh et al. note. “An examination of Twitter data found that conservative political elites shared links to lower-quality news sites than liberal political elites in the USA, Germany and the UK.””
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“”differential treatment of those on one versus the other side of the aisle does not on its own constitute evidence of political bias on the part of social media companies.””
https://reason.com/2024/10/10/can-differences-in-misinformation-sharing-explain-political-disparities-in-social-media-suspensions/