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.”

“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.””

“”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/

2024 Election, Media Misinformation, & Geopolitics w/ Jon Stewart and London Mayor Sadiq Khan

The algorithm is not free speech. It puts people in contact with misinformation and anger-inducing content. Inciting people to violence is not protected free speech. In England, people were attacked and property was destroyed because people were incensed by what turned out to be false information.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbcxKiaBNPU

Why Trump’s lies about Haitians are different

“The idea that Haitians in Springfield are abducting people’s pets and eating them is not just a normal lie, the way that Trump has long accused migrants of selling drugs and committing street crimes. The idea of barbecuing a neighbor’s beloved pet is such a violation, so alien in nature, that it renders the alleged targets outside the scope of what we recognize as human behavior. It is an attack on Haitians not only as individuals, but as an entire group. It is a kind of dehumanization that has historically led to deadly violence against the targeted group — often by design.
Two New York Times columnists, Lydia Polgreen and Jamelle Bouie, have labeled the animal eating rhetoric a “blood libel” for this reason.

The term originates in medieval Europe, specifically to describe the lie that Jews were abducting Christian children and using their blood to bake matzah (an unleavened bread we eat during the Passover holiday). The calumny, which persisted through the Nazi era, was designed explicitly to cast Jews beyond the pale of acceptable society — to link Judaism as a religion and identity to barbarism and brutality. It was, as Bouie notes, frequently employed to whip up violence against the Jewish community.

You don’t need to be a historian to see the obvious connections between accusing Jews of eating children and Haitians of eating pets. And since the Haitian Revolution, Americans have often treated Haitians as the embodiment of the terrifying racial “other” in the same way that Europeans displaced their fears and resentments onto Jews. The crank presidential candidate Marianne Williamson helpfully made the subtext the text in a tweet, saying that Democrats dismiss Trump’s lies at their peril because “Haitian voodoo is in fact real.”

The same is true with another Vance lie about Springfield: that Haitians are responsible for a surge in communicable diseases, including HIV/AIDS. I say it’s a lie because there’s no public evidence supporting it, and authorities on the ground contradict it.

“A common myth that I’ve heard is that we’ve seen all of our communicable diseases skyrocket and go through the roof. And really, when you look at the data, that’s not supported,” Chris Coon, a county health commissioner, told the local ABC affiliate.

Once again, this lie has a deeply troubling history. Immigrants have long been falsely accused of bringing disease to keep them out; Nazis did the same to Jews.

Specifically, Nazi propaganda would regularly accuse Jews of spreading typhus, a lice-borne disease that killed millions in early 20th century Europe. Much like HIV, typhus was a stigmatized ailment stereotypically associated with the moral defectiveness or dirtiness of the afflicted. Nazi doctors wrote pseudo-scientific papers accusing Jews of spreading typhus due to our alleged “low cultural level” and “uncleanliness,” part of the justification for cramming Jews in Polish ghettos before shipping my ancestors and their co-religionists to death camps.

In the past, attention to these kinds of glaringly obvious Nazi parallels might have seemed like enough to shame the Trump campaign into at least toning down its rhetoric. But now, those normative guardrails no longer hold.

On the right today, there is a pervasive sense that any allegation of fascism, authoritarianism, or racism is a bad-faith smear designed to delegitimize conservative policies and politicians. It is a tactic used by American defenders of Viktor Orbán’s regime in Hungary, but one most often used to excuse bad behavior at home. It can be used even to whitewash the flirtations with open fascism that are common among young rightists nowadays, like the inclusion of a Nazi symbol in a video pushed out by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s primary campaign.

I’m sure it’s frustrating to be constantly accused of backing a fascist for president when you genuinely don’t see yourself in that light. But at the same time, it gives the green light to ignore an awful lot of extremely dangerous behavior.”

https://www.vox.com/politics/372364/trumps-haitians-springfield-ohio-nazi

New Survey Data Undermine Trump’s Narrative of Rising Crime

“The new numbers indicate that the violent crime victimization rate fell slightly in 2023, although the change was not statistically significant. “Findings show that there was an overall decline in the rate of violent victimization over the last three decades, from
1993 to 2023,” BJS Acting Director Kevin M. Scott reports. “While the 2023 rate was higher than those in 2020 and 2021, it was not statistically different from the rate 5 years ago, in 2019.”

That observation is inconvenient for Trump, who wants to blame Harris for rising crime during the Biden administration. Leaving aside the plausibility of assuming that a president, let alone a vice president, has much influence on crime rates, Trump’s thesis relies on the assumption that violent crime is more common now than it was during his administration. But even according to the data source he prefers, the 2023 rate was statistically indistinguishable from the rate in 2019, his second-to-last year in office.”

https://reason.com/2024/09/16/new-survey-data-undermine-trumps-narrative-of-rising-crime/

America’s looming election crisis, explained in 3 charts

Trump supporters thrive in falsity and anti-democratic attitudes.

“If Trump loses, about a quarter of Republicans said they think he should do whatever it takes to ensure he becomes president anyway, according to a September PRRI poll.”

“among Republicans, Trump proved by far the most trusted source of information about election results, well above local and national news outlets. In an Associated Press/NORC/USAFacts poll from earlier this month, more than 60 percent of Republicans said they believe Trump himself is the best place to get the facts about results.”

“Trump’s long-running insistence that he won in 2020 appears to be having an effect over time, with several surveys measuring greater buy-in of his lies about the election from voters today than in the past. A December Washington Post/University of Maryland poll found that 36 percent of US adults did not believe Biden was legitimately elected, compared to 29 percent two years prior. And in a Pew Research poll conducted earlier this month, 27 percent of US adults said that Trump did nothing wrong in trying to overturn the election results, up from 23 percent in April.”

https://www.vox.com/politics/372863/2024-election-lies-trump-overturn-harris

Trump Falsely Claims That ‘Homicides Are Skyrocketing,’ an Imaginary Trend He Blames on Kamala Harris

“”Homicides Are Skyrocketing in American Cities Under Kamala Harris,” Donald Trump’s campaign avers in a statement issued on Monday. Like Trump’s assertion that “our crime rate is going up,” this claim is completely at odds with reality.
According to FBI data, the homicide rate jumped by more than 27 percent in 2020, when Trump was president; rose slightly in 2021, the first year of the Biden administration; and fell by 7 percent in 2022. Preliminary FBI numbers show bigger drops in 2023 (about 13 percent) and this year (26 percent for the first quarter). So far this year, according to data from 277 cities, homicides are down by about 17 percent.”

https://reason.com/2024/08/13/trump-falsely-claims-that-homicides-are-skyrocketing-an-imaginary-trend-he-blames-on-kamala-harris/

Tim Walz Keeps Lying

“For Tim Walz, in vitro fertilization (IVF) is a deeply personal issue—or at least he made it seem that way. In several recent interviews, the Minnesota governor and Democratic vice presidential candidate implied or outright suggested that his own two children were conceived using IVF.
One problem: It’s not true. Walz’s children were conceived using intrauterine insemination (IUI), not IVF. These are two very different things, and the policy conversations about them are fundamentally distinct; many religious conservatives want to prohibit IVF—which can result in the destruction of unused fertilized embryos outside the womb—but not IUI.

Yet Walz tried to link his own personal experience with potential efforts by Republicans to ban IVF. This is misleading, since he and his wife used IUI, not IVF.

It was an oft-repeated error. On Facebook, Walz wrote that his family had taken advantage of reproductive health care options like IVF, which is true enough. But then he told the Pod Save America podcast that his two kids were born “that way,” in reference to IVF. Worse still, on MSNBC, he flatly stated: “Thank God for IVF, my wife and I have two beautiful children.”

It makes sense that some people who have little familiarity with either procedure use IVF as shorthand for both. But Walz should have a more granular understanding of what they involve. Moreover, he has accused his opponents of wanting to ban IVF. Walz attacked his rival, Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, saying: “If it were up to him, I wouldn’t have a family, because of IVF, and the things that we need to do reproductively.””

“The best major media exposé on Walz’s incautious truth telling came from CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski, who revealed that Walz repeatedly lied about his 1995 arrest for drunk driving when he ran for Congress a decade later.

Walz was stopped for driving 96 mph in a 55 mph zone and admitted to police that he had been drinking. His blood alcohol level was .128.

“But in 2006, his campaign repeatedly told the press that he had not been drinking that night, claiming that his failed field sobriety test was due to a misunderstanding related to hearing loss from his time in the National Guard,” wrote Kaczynski. “The campaign also claimed that Walz was allowed to drive himself to jail that night. None of that was true.”

These were direct lies, and there’s no excuse for them.”

https://reason.com/2024/08/22/tim-walz-keeps-lying/

J.D. Vance Says It Does Not Matter Whether ‘Rumors’ of Pet-Eating Migrants Are True

“It seems clear that neither Trump nor Vance is interested in a rational conversation. “With this rhetoric,” Bettina Makalintal noted on Eater last week, “the Republican party is picking from the most predictable xenophobic playbook and invoking time-worn fear mongering.” The idea that “immigrants ‘eat pets,'” she wrote, “is meant to signify their backwardness, danger, and inferiority, ” which “then justifies the Republican party’s efforts to curtail immigration.”
For politicians “perpetuating this false narrative,” Makalintal observed, “the truth has taken a back seat to the intended message: that immigrants are not ‘like us’ and therefore pose a threat to hard-won American lives.” Trump and Vance, she said, are implicitly drawing a contrast between “white ‘Americans’ with household pets like Fluffy and Fido as members of the family” and dark-skinned immigrants who are “trouncing on that which is held dear.”

Implicit racism aside, Vance is proving to be just as impervious to reality as the man he once condemned as a “total fraud” who was shockingly xenophobic, “reprehensible,” “a moral disaster,” and even possibly “America’s Hitler.””

“All of this is reminiscent of Trump’s attitude toward claims of fraud during the 2020 presidential election, which he was eager to accept no matter how outlandish and unsubstantiated they were. During the notorious telephone conversation in which he pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” the votes necessary to reverse Joe Biden’s victory in that state, for example, Trump mentioned a rumor that election officials had “supposedly shredded…3,000 pounds of ballots.” That report, he conceded, “may or may not be true.” Yet within a few sentences, Trump had persuaded himself that the allegations were reliable enough to establish “a very sad situation” crying out for correction.

Where does Vance stand on Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen through systematic fraud? He recently argued that Trump had raised concerns that were valid and troubling enough to justify “a big debate” about whether electoral votes for Biden from battleground states should have been officially recognized, although “that doesn’t necessarily mean the results would have been any different.” Alluding to “the problems that existed in 2020,” Vance said that if he had been vice president at the time, “I would’ve told the states like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the U.S. Congress should’ve fought over it from there.”

Just as he refuses to definitively say whether he believes Hatians actually have been eating people’s cats and dogs in Springfield, Vance has declined to explicitly endorse or reject Trump’s stolen-election fantasy. In both cases, he seems to think the fact that someone made a wild allegation is enough to justify “a big debate” about whether it might be true, even when there is no evidence to support it.

You can either live in the real world or be Donald Trump’s running mate. Vance has made his choice.”

https://reason.com/2024/09/15/j-d-vance-says-it-does-not-matter-whether-rumors-of-pet-eating-migrants-are-true/

J.D. Vance Promoted Rumors of Pet-Eating Immigrants Even After Learning They Were ‘Baseless’

“To justify Vance’s continued promotion of what he himself had described as “rumors” that might not be true, the candidate’s staff on Tuesday gave the Journal “a police report in which a resident had claimed her pet might have been taken by Haitian neighbors.” But “when a reporter went to Anna Kilgore’s house Tuesday evening, she said her cat Miss Sassy, which went missing in late August, had actually returned a few days later—found safe in her own basement.” Kilgore, who was “wearing a Trump shirt and hat,” said “she apologized to her Haitian neighbors with the help of her daughter and a mobile-phone translation app.”
The “cat-eating rumors,” the Journal notes, “started with a post by a Springfield woman on a private Facebook page.” That account “turned out to be third-hand” and was “subsequently disavowed by the original poster, according to NewsGuard, a company that tracks online misinformation.”

This is the sort of evidence that Vance apparently had in mind when he told CNN’s Dana Bash that his information about pet-eating immigrants “comes from firsthand accounts from my constituents.””

https://reason.com/2024/09/18/j-d-vance-promoted-rumors-of-pet-eating-immigrants-even-after-learning-they-were-baseless/