"conservative accounts may be more often sanctioned because they post more misinformation."
https://wapo.st/4gJuX7j
Why conservatives get suspended more than liberals on social media
The “censorship” of Americans by social media companies... a years-long Republican contention that Silicon Valley tech giants have suppressed conservative views on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter. That narrative has underpinned congressional hearings, Republican fundraising campaigns, the dismantling of academic research centers, Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, state laws seeking to restrict online content moderation, and multiple lawsuits that reached the Supreme Court this year.
But is it true? Well, yes and no, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Conservatives and Trump supporters are indeed more likely to have their posts on major social media platforms taken down or their accounts suspended than are liberals and Joe Biden supporters, researchers from Oxford University, MIT and other institutions found. But that doesn’t necessarily mean content moderation is biased.
Rather, the study finds that conservative accounts may be more often sanctioned because they post more misinformation.
That might sound either obvious or disingenuous, depending on your point of view. But the study, whose lead author is Oxford Internet Institute professor Mohsen Mosleh, is actually neither.
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.
cont...
The Nature study “totally makes sense” and dovetails with previous findings, said Filippo Menczer, a computer science professor and director of Indiana University’s Social Media Observatory. His own past work has found that extreme partisans on both the right and the left share more information from low-credibility sources than moderates, but that the phenomenon is much more pronounced on the right than the left.
Given the findings, Menczer said, social media companies would have to be biased in favor of conservatives to sanction liberals at an equal rate.
The study published Wednesday in Nature doesn’t seek to explain why conservatives are more prone to traffic in falsehoods. And to what extent its findings hold true in 2024 is unclear.
Much of the analysis relies on data from an era when Facebook and Twitter were on high alert for falsehoods about both elections and, starting in 2020, the covid-19 pandemic.
Both sites have since eased their misinformation policies, and Musk has welcomed back previously suspended accounts since buying Twitter in 2022 and rebranding it X. Last month, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote a letter to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who has spearheaded the Republican crusade against content moderation, blaming the Biden administration for leaning on his company to police covid-19 content.
Rand said his study suggests those reversals may rest on a false premise.
Where social media companies once faced an outcry over their role in fueling falsehoods, it’s now “a much bigger threat to be yelled at for being anti-conservative than it is to be yelled at for letting misinformation spread,” he said.
As a result, he added, “a lot of tech companies are scared to touch anything related to anti-misinformation in this election run-up” — a concern given the sheer volume of misinformation being peddled.
by Sharlee 13 months ago
Do you care about freedom of speech at all? Can a Federal agency coordinating with social media companies to effectively censor "election-related speech." be compared to something one might expect in a communist country? Is our Homeland Security Agency now on the weaponization list,...
by ga anderson 4 years ago
In light of the recent Twitter/facebook NY Post censorship controversy, and as a nod to Savvydating's thought about the current power of Social Media, (read; facebook, Twitter, Google), I have some thoughts about the power of our predominate social media networks..But first, these thoughts aren't...
by ptosis 7 years ago
The "million-dollar question" about the Facebook ads centered on how the Russians knew whom to target. How did the Russians knew where to direct their ads? The Russian bought Facebook ads to amplify political discord.The ads were bought through Facebook's self-service ad model, which...
by ga anderson 4 years ago
This is a tricky one for me. I am a firm Capitalist. I believe in private companies' rights.But, like our nationally regulated gas, power, and light utilities, has the internet and social media platforms reached utility status?I think it can be reasonably argued that internet access has become as...
by Tim Mitchell 6 weeks ago
Instagram announced on Sept. 17th their new Teen Accounts. Instagram is owned by Meta also owners of Facebook. Beginning that day and over the next 60 days all teens under 16 will automatically revert to that. New users under 16 can only use that type of account. And . . ."Instagram on Tuesday...
by Kenna McHugh 10 years ago
Why do you think the news media reports bad news that is tainted with falsehoods?
Copyright © 2024 The Arena Media Brands, LLC and respective content providers on this website. HubPages® is a registered trademark of The Arena Platform, Inc. Other product and company names shown may be trademarks of their respective owners. The Arena Media Brands, LLC and respective content providers to this website may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website.
Copyright © 2024 Maven Media Brands, LLC and respective owners.
As a user in the EEA, your approval is needed on a few things. To provide a better website experience, hubpages.com uses cookies (and other similar technologies) and may collect, process, and share personal data. Please choose which areas of our service you consent to our doing so.
For more information on managing or withdrawing consents and how we handle data, visit our Privacy Policy at: https://corp.maven.io/privacy-policy
Show DetailsNecessary | |
---|---|
HubPages Device ID | This is used to identify particular browsers or devices when the access the service, and is used for security reasons. |
Login | This is necessary to sign in to the HubPages Service. |
Google Recaptcha | This is used to prevent bots and spam. (Privacy Policy) |
Akismet | This is used to detect comment spam. (Privacy Policy) |
HubPages Google Analytics | This is used to provide data on traffic to our website, all personally identifyable data is anonymized. (Privacy Policy) |
HubPages Traffic Pixel | This is used to collect data on traffic to articles and other pages on our site. Unless you are signed in to a HubPages account, all personally identifiable information is anonymized. |
Amazon Web Services | This is a cloud services platform that we used to host our service. (Privacy Policy) |
Cloudflare | This is a cloud CDN service that we use to efficiently deliver files required for our service to operate such as javascript, cascading style sheets, images, and videos. (Privacy Policy) |
Google Hosted Libraries | Javascript software libraries such as jQuery are loaded at endpoints on the googleapis.com or gstatic.com domains, for performance and efficiency reasons. (Privacy Policy) |
Features | |
---|---|
Google Custom Search | This is feature allows you to search the site. (Privacy Policy) |
Google Maps | Some articles have Google Maps embedded in them. (Privacy Policy) |
Google Charts | This is used to display charts and graphs on articles and the author center. (Privacy Policy) |
Google AdSense Host API | This service allows you to sign up for or associate a Google AdSense account with HubPages, so that you can earn money from ads on your articles. No data is shared unless you engage with this feature. (Privacy Policy) |
Google YouTube | Some articles have YouTube videos embedded in them. (Privacy Policy) |
Vimeo | Some articles have Vimeo videos embedded in them. (Privacy Policy) |
Paypal | This is used for a registered author who enrolls in the HubPages Earnings program and requests to be paid via PayPal. No data is shared with Paypal unless you engage with this feature. (Privacy Policy) |
Facebook Login | You can use this to streamline signing up for, or signing in to your Hubpages account. No data is shared with Facebook unless you engage with this feature. (Privacy Policy) |
Maven | This supports the Maven widget and search functionality. (Privacy Policy) |
Marketing | |
---|---|
Google AdSense | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Google DoubleClick | Google provides ad serving technology and runs an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Index Exchange | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Sovrn | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Facebook Ads | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Amazon Unified Ad Marketplace | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
AppNexus | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Openx | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Rubicon Project | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
TripleLift | This is an ad network. (Privacy Policy) |
Say Media | We partner with Say Media to deliver ad campaigns on our sites. (Privacy Policy) |
Remarketing Pixels | We may use remarketing pixels from advertising networks such as Google AdWords, Bing Ads, and Facebook in order to advertise the HubPages Service to people that have visited our sites. |
Conversion Tracking Pixels | We may use conversion tracking pixels from advertising networks such as Google AdWords, Bing Ads, and Facebook in order to identify when an advertisement has successfully resulted in the desired action, such as signing up for the HubPages Service or publishing an article on the HubPages Service. |
Statistics | |
---|---|
Author Google Analytics | This is used to provide traffic data and reports to the authors of articles on the HubPages Service. (Privacy Policy) |
Comscore | ComScore is a media measurement and analytics company providing marketing data and analytics to enterprises, media and advertising agencies, and publishers. Non-consent will result in ComScore only processing obfuscated personal data. (Privacy Policy) |
Amazon Tracking Pixel | Some articles display amazon products as part of the Amazon Affiliate program, this pixel provides traffic statistics for those products (Privacy Policy) |
Clicksco | This is a data management platform studying reader behavior (Privacy Policy) |