Quote:The Nature paper is not the first to find that conservatives are more likely to share stories that have been debunked, or that originate from fake news sites or other sources deemed “low-quality.” One common objection to such studies is that defining what counts as misinformation can be subjective. For instance, if the fact-checkers skew liberal or the list of fake news sites skews conservative, that in itself could explain the discrepancy in sharing behavior.
But study co-author David G. Rand, an MIT computational social science professor, said his team found that conservatives share more falsehoods and low-quality information online even when you let groups of Republicans define what counts as false or low-quality.
A previous version of the study, which was published online in 2022 before undergoing peer review, focused largely on an analysis of 9,000 politically active Twitter users during the 2020 election. It found that accounts that shared pro-Trump hashtags were both more likely to post links to low-quality sites — including those purveying falsehoods about the election — and more likely to end up suspended than those that shared pro-Biden hashtags.
The study didn’t examine the reasons for suspension, so it’s not clear that the sharing of links to dubious sites was the cause — just that it was correlated. Social media companies can suspend accounts or take down posts for all sorts of reasons, including hate speech, targeted harassment of other users, or because they turn out to be bots.
Since then, Rand said the researchers have bolstered the core findings with seven other datasets examining Twitter users, Facebook users, and surveys from 16 countries spanning 2016 to 2023. Among other things, they found that conservatives from other countries also shared misinformation at higher rates than liberals in those counties.
The research doesn’t prove that social media companies are totally unbiased, Rand told Tech Brief.
What it shows is that conservatives would face more content moderation than liberals even if both the definition of misinformation and the enforcement of policies were politically neutral.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/...ensorship/