This is a summary and short discussion of a scholarly publication from Nature: "Differences in misinformation sharing can lead to politically asymmetric sanctions" by Mosleh et al. The researchers found nearly 1000 registered Democrats and Republicans and asked them to rate the trustworthiness of news websites. These were "laypeople" in that they did not have journalistic training or were active in the media profession. The bipartisan ratings were then compared to the posts on web 2.0 sites like Twitter, Facebook and other sites that moderate content and can suspend content posters. The unsurprising finding was that people who aligned with conservative agendas posted content from untrustworthy sites 4x more than those that aligned with liberals. They were also, then, over 4x more likely to have been suspended by 9 months later. This evidence was cross-cultural (UK, Germany) and also showed a correlation when only Republican laypeople ranked the trustworthiness of media sites. If this wasn't troubling enough, even conservative "elites"-- supposed leaders or more-followed content posters-- shared fake news from untrustworthy sites, which followers then re-posted. The article also has links to other studies that have found similarly: that conservatives share more fake news than liberals. The question of what actually caused the content posters to be suspended by the social media sites is not answered (undercutting my conclusory headline), but one upshot of the study is that it shows there is a completely valid explanation for suspension that is different from "political bias", namely, a desire to limit fake news.
No comments:
Post a Comment