8 ms·

Is Twitter biased against conservatives? A Study

26 points by kenjackson 5y ago

yablak 5y ago
"... the observation that Republicans were more likely to be suspended than Democrats provides no support for the claim that Twitter showed political bias in its suspension practices. Instead, the observed asymmetry could be explained entirely by the tendency of Republicans to share more misinformation. While support for action against misinformation is bipartisan, the sharing of misinformation –at least at this historical moment –is heavily asymmetric across parties. As a result, our study shows that it is inappropriate to make inferences about political bias from asymmetries in suspension rates."
- DamnYuppie 5y ago
  The key here is who is defining misinformation. As the COVID lab leak and Hunter Biden laptop story show there has been a tendency to loudly dismiss or condemn any dissenting opinions of those that don't align with the mainstream narrative as "misinformation". Only to subsequently find out later that these were not as far fetched or misinformed as previously believed.
  - aNoob7000 5y ago
    Has the Covid lab leak been proven true? As for the Hunter Biden laptop story, what's the issue? I just want to know specifically.
    - _-david-_ 5y ago
      Lab leak hasn't been proven true, but hasn't been proven false. People were told they were spreading misinformation and xenophobia / racism if they talked about it. Some portions of Hunter Biden laptop have been proven true (the emails on the laptop are legit) but people were banned for spreading hacked content (deapite it not being hacked) and spreading Russian disinformation.
      - jandrese 5y ago
        sintaxi 5y ago
        dragonwriter 5y ago
        > Pretty sure the theory is that COVID was used to change the course of the 2020 election I mean, sure, that seems to have been attempted, but by the US GOP: https://www.businessinsider.com/kushner-covid-19-plan-maybe-axed-for-political-reasons-report-2020-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/kushner-covid-19-plan-maybe-...
      - gaganyaan 5y ago
        What exactly do you mean by emails? I ask, because AFAIK there's exactly one email that's been validated: https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/hunter-dkim/blob/main/Meeting%20for%20coffee.eml https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/hunter-dkim/blob/main/M... Have all of the emails on the laptop been verified, or is it still just that one?
        _-david-_ 5y ago
        The NYT article seemed to indicate emails along with a cache of files were authenticated. I am not sure if only one was actually authenticated and people are assuming all of them were or not.
      - technothrasher 5y ago
        > Lab leak hasn't been proven true, but hasn't been proven false. That’s a lazy argument from ignorance, and can be dismissed out of hand by Hitchens’s Razor. (See “philosophical burden of proof”)
        _-david-_ 5y ago
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - busterarm 5y ago
    And the Russian DNC hack. Crowdstrike's President told the public one thing and then testified to the House Intelligence Committee that there's no evidence of Russian involvement. This didn't seem to stop multiple MSNBC hosts from shouting about Russian election meddling, long after the Justice Department dropped such claims and related charges.
  - amscanne 5y ago
    I’m not sure why you have been downvoted. It may be true that the Republicans share information from sketchier sources, but the Hunter Biden laptop story suppression was so bad that I don’t think Democrats have a leg to stand on here. The message that it was “Russian disinformation” was completely evidence-free and baseless, and the fact that Twitter blocked the URL was a clear signal that the standards for different political views is different.
    - civilized 5y ago
      I think the conclusions of the paper probably stand, but a more rigorous analysis will need to address this. Fact-checkers have occasionally made serious errors, and in other cases made arbitrary, premature, or flimsy judgments of ambiguous situations, essentially passing off opinion as fact. From what I've seen, these errors and arbitrary judgments tend to favor the liberal side. Scholars will need to remove these errors and arbitrary judgment calls from the "misinformation score" and see whether there continues to be a big partisan gap. Again, my gut feeling is that the conclusions wouldn't be changed much. There's plenty of genuine right-wing misinformation out there that isn't tied to erroneous or opinion-based fact-checking. But a paper like this really needs to get down to brass tacks about what exactly is being called misinformation, or it will only be yet more ammunition for political and culture wars, and won't provide any scientific enlightenment. I suspect that certain segments of the left would also be somewhat vindicated by a more serious and detailed review of what is deemed misinformation. Dissenters on all sides are at least sometimes unfairly treated by the mainstream fact-checking institutions.
      - jimbob45 5y ago
        >I suspect that certain segments of the left would also be somewhat vindicated by a more serious and detailed review of what is deemed misinformation. "Certain segments of the left" still believe that the Russians have a video of hookers peeing on Trump that they're using to puppeteer him to their own needs. The left has no business lecturing anyone about misinformation.
        5y ago
  - jandrese 5y ago
    The study defined misinformation as links to articles that were deemed to be false by fact checkers.
  - lambada 5y ago
    As the paper says in respect of politically motivated definitions of mis-information > Helping to address concerns about potential liberal bias among fact-checkers, we also examined untrustworthiness ratings from politically-balanced crowds of demographically representative (quota-sampled) American laypeople recruited via Lucid (15), rather than professional fact-checkers.
  - jonathan-adly 5y ago
    I am not sure why are you downvoted. But yes, who labels what's harmful misinformation and what is a legitimate dissenting voice is a big factor and the source of bias. Zoom away from the polarizing US "current thing" BS politics and it becomes even clearer. Things like ESG, Nuclear energy, Middle Eastern conflicts, religious freedoms, criticizing China, etc. The world is mostly gray, and whoever sets the boundaries of good/bad is king (that's why Media is valuable to billionaires and dictators).
  - skoskie 5y ago
    Chronology matters here. Any conspiracy theory, no matter how seemingly unhinged could become factual in time. And when you spew misinformation and lies everyday you are bound to have some lies eventually emerge as truth. None of that should lend credibility to the people who found themselves eventually and accidentally speaking the truth. > The key here is who is defining misinformation. We should respect the processes that are used to establish truthful information, even if it is occasionally wrong, rather than the noise makers who are occasionally right. In other words “who” should not be a factor in determining misinformation, but “how”.
agomez314 5y ago
From reading the abstract, it seems like an exercise in circular logic.
- olsonjeffery 5y ago
  Please expand upon this argument.
  - laverya 5y ago
    "Republican leaning users were banned ~5x more often than Democratic leaning users, but they also shared misinformation more as decided by we-promise-they're-neutral fact checkers and the average American, so there's no discrimination against Republican leaning users" Which to me means "there's no discrimination unless the fact checkers and average American discriminate", also known as "there's no discrimination unless there's discrimination", which is circular logic.
    - alwayseasy 5y ago
      Claiming misinformation and opinion should be treated as equals is probably the problem. Most open democracies have agreed misinformation can't be treated equally.
      - JMS2021 5y ago
        Hunter Bidens laptop was fact checked by various outlets but we found out later that was a lie. Who owns the fact checkers?
        alphabettsy 5y ago
        You mean the claims being made by the Trump camp were unsubstantiated? Because that happened and they were at the time.
        belltaco 5y ago
        That's the exception that proves the rule. Fact checkers rarely can be wrong. The overwhelming amount of times they are very correct. If anyone thinks I am wrong, they can list a dozen times fact checkers were wrong.
nynx 5y ago
- TwoNineA 5y ago
- theknocker 5y ago
- Proven 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- wincy 5y ago
- twoxproblematic 5y ago
Tehchops 5y ago
I see disproportionate amount of violence/threats from right-leaning personas online. Perhaps that is a factor? Yes, I know it's anecdotal, but the LGBTQ+ community has been the victim of an increasing number of hate crimes(confirmed by law enforcement reporting), and the rhetoric online seems to mirror this. Free speech does not cover overt or implied violence based on sexual or gender identity.
- _-david-_ 5y ago
  Do you have any evidence that it is disproportionately coming from the right? I see a lot more coming from the left so it seems a bit anecdotal.
  - jandrese 5y ago
    Can you post any link to left leaning people calling for violence against LGBTQ aligned individuals?
    - _-david-_ 5y ago
      I'm not sure I could easily find an example but there have been some lesbians who had calls of violence against them because they are a so called TERF. I was, however, talking about general calls to violence not specifically against LGBT people. The first paragraph from the post I was replying to made no mention of LGBT. I should have quoted that part to make it more clear what exactly I was talking about. Sorry about the confusion.
  - danaris 5y ago
    Well, let's see here. We have one "side" publicly and loudly proclaiming the same things as racist lynch mobs from the 1800s and literal Nazis. We have another "side" publicly and loudly calling for dignity and respect for every human being. It would seem logical to me that the burden of proof here would be on the person claiming that the latter is sending more hate and death threats than the former. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
pphysch 5y ago
"Instead, the observed asymmetry could be explained entirely by the tendency of Republicans to share more misinformation." ...misinformation defined by whom? Factually speaking, the vast bulk of the "Russiagate" scandal was a hoax designed to achieve a political agenda, pure and simple. Trump may be as corrupt as the next guy, but there is no evidence that implicates him as a Russian asset. But who was removed from social media for boosting this blatant misinformation? Literally no one.
- olsonjeffery 5y ago
  If you read the study you would know the answer, because they literally define the very thing you’re asking about. As helpfully posted elsewhere in this thread: > Helping to address concerns about potential liberal bias among fact-checkers, we also examined untrustworthiness ratings from politically-balanced crowds of demographically representative (quota-sampled) American laypeople recruited via Lucid (15), rather than professional fact-checkers.
  - pphysch 5y ago
    The study pivots around popular perceptions of QAnon/Pizzagate as the archetype of "misinformation" and has zero mention of its political mirror-image, Russiagate. Both are false and ridiculous conspiracy theories aimed at defaming the opposing leadership. By omitting one of the two elephants (donkeys?) in the room, it has hard to take this study seriously. Very poor experimental design.
- alphabettsy 5y ago
  Didn’t the Trump Camp lie about meeting with Russian operatives? Didn’t people end up in jail for lying and refusing to cooperate? It was absolutely political, but isn’t anything concerning an investigation of a sitting President?
  - pphysch 5y ago
    The bottom line is that the Steele Dossier was a QAnon-tier piece of disinformation, yet was endlessly paraded as "mostly true" by establishment media. That is an unexcusable double standard.
Sohurt00 5y ago
JohnClark1337 5y ago
jonathan-adly 5y ago
Basically whoever gets to labels what's harmful misinformation and what is a legitimate dissenting voice is the source of bias. Everything else is noise. The study is a great example of that noise. Zoom away from the polarizing US "current thing" BS politics and it becomes even clearer. Things like ESG, Nuclear energy, Middle Eastern conflicts, religious freedoms, criticizing China, etc. The world is mostly gray, and whoever sets the boundaries of good/bad is king (that's why Media is valuable to billionaires and dictators).
- busterarm 5y ago
  This is why the Saudi leadership invests so heavily in companies like Twitter and other media companies.
- silicon2401 5y ago
  > whoever gets to labels what's harmful misinformation and what is a legitimate dissenting voice is the source of bias "misinformation" is the cleverest weapon against free speech in a while, despite being an old trick. It lets people support censorship while feeling like they're just opposing something evil. Catholic Europe said "heresy" or "blasphemy", McCarthyist USA said "communist", Islamic societies said "haram", secular dictatorships said "degenerate", etc etc.
padobson 5y ago
I'd like to see a study that correlates use of Twitter's "report" button with political persuasion. My hypothesis is that lefties are more likely to appeal to authority and hit the "report" button when they see something they don't like, and right wingers are more likely to go vigilante and hit "reply" and attempt to persuade/shout the person into agreeing with them.
- orwin 5y ago
  I don't think you know a lot of lefties, or that your lefties are at worst socdems (barely leftwing)
- ddingus 5y ago
  I break it down on authoritarian lines. Left, right, indie are a separate thing. Authoritarians do these things most often: Brigade, mass report, preemptive blocks, use of lists. Malicious Compliance and or using, gaming rules to get other people into problem positions. Tribe vs tribe, guilty by association, and or forcing others into false choice scenarios. Mixing authoritarianism with political alignment complicates things unnecessarily in my view. There can be poor quality people favoring any ideology, and or multiple ones, same as there can be better quality people. I urge you to give it some thought. You may find it helps to understand others better.
thorAway007 5y ago
zmibes 5y ago
Might as well ask the Catholic church to conduct a study into whether God exists. (They are the experts, right?)

26 points by kenjackson 5y ago

"... the observation that Republicans were more likely to be suspended than Democrats provides no support for the claim that Twitter showed political bias in its suspension practices. Instead, the observed asymmetry could be explained entirely by the tendency of Republicans to share more misinformation. While support for action against misinformation is bipartisan, the sharing of misinformation –at least at this historical moment –is heavily asymmetric across parties. As a result, our study shows that it is inappropriate to make inferences about political bias from asymmetries in suspension rates."

DamnYuppie 5y ago
The key here is who is defining misinformation. As the COVID lab leak and Hunter Biden laptop story show there has been a tendency to loudly dismiss or condemn any dissenting opinions of those that don't align with the mainstream narrative as "misinformation". Only to subsequently find out later that these were not as far fetched or misinformed as previously believed.
- aNoob7000 5y ago
  Has the Covid lab leak been proven true? As for the Hunter Biden laptop story, what's the issue? I just want to know specifically.
  - _-david-_ 5y ago
    Lab leak hasn't been proven true, but hasn't been proven false. People were told they were spreading misinformation and xenophobia / racism if they talked about it. Some portions of Hunter Biden laptop have been proven true (the emails on the laptop are legit) but people were banned for spreading hacked content (deapite it not being hacked) and spreading Russian disinformation.
    - jandrese 5y ago
      - sintaxi 5y ago
        dragonwriter 5y ago
        > Pretty sure the theory is that COVID was used to change the course of the 2020 election I mean, sure, that seems to have been attempted, but by the US GOP: https://www.businessinsider.com/kushner-covid-19-plan-maybe-axed-for-political-reasons-report-2020-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/kushner-covid-19-plan-maybe-...
    - gaganyaan 5y ago
      What exactly do you mean by emails? I ask, because AFAIK there's exactly one email that's been validated: https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/hunter-dkim/blob/main/Meeting%20for%20coffee.eml https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/hunter-dkim/blob/main/M... Have all of the emails on the laptop been verified, or is it still just that one?
      - _-david-_ 5y ago
        The NYT article seemed to indicate emails along with a cache of files were authenticated. I am not sure if only one was actually authenticated and people are assuming all of them were or not.
    - technothrasher 5y ago
      > Lab leak hasn't been proven true, but hasn't been proven false. That’s a lazy argument from ignorance, and can be dismissed out of hand by Hitchens’s Razor. (See “philosophical burden of proof”)
      - _-david-_ 5y ago
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- busterarm 5y ago
  And the Russian DNC hack. Crowdstrike's President told the public one thing and then testified to the House Intelligence Committee that there's no evidence of Russian involvement. This didn't seem to stop multiple MSNBC hosts from shouting about Russian election meddling, long after the Justice Department dropped such claims and related charges.
- amscanne 5y ago
  I’m not sure why you have been downvoted. It may be true that the Republicans share information from sketchier sources, but the Hunter Biden laptop story suppression was so bad that I don’t think Democrats have a leg to stand on here. The message that it was “Russian disinformation” was completely evidence-free and baseless, and the fact that Twitter blocked the URL was a clear signal that the standards for different political views is different.
  - civilized 5y ago
    I think the conclusions of the paper probably stand, but a more rigorous analysis will need to address this. Fact-checkers have occasionally made serious errors, and in other cases made arbitrary, premature, or flimsy judgments of ambiguous situations, essentially passing off opinion as fact. From what I've seen, these errors and arbitrary judgments tend to favor the liberal side. Scholars will need to remove these errors and arbitrary judgment calls from the "misinformation score" and see whether there continues to be a big partisan gap. Again, my gut feeling is that the conclusions wouldn't be changed much. There's plenty of genuine right-wing misinformation out there that isn't tied to erroneous or opinion-based fact-checking. But a paper like this really needs to get down to brass tacks about what exactly is being called misinformation, or it will only be yet more ammunition for political and culture wars, and won't provide any scientific enlightenment. I suspect that certain segments of the left would also be somewhat vindicated by a more serious and detailed review of what is deemed misinformation. Dissenters on all sides are at least sometimes unfairly treated by the mainstream fact-checking institutions.
    - jimbob45 5y ago
      >I suspect that certain segments of the left would also be somewhat vindicated by a more serious and detailed review of what is deemed misinformation. "Certain segments of the left" still believe that the Russians have a video of hookers peeing on Trump that they're using to puppeteer him to their own needs. The left has no business lecturing anyone about misinformation.
      - 5y ago
- jandrese 5y ago
  The study defined misinformation as links to articles that were deemed to be false by fact checkers.
- lambada 5y ago
  As the paper says in respect of politically motivated definitions of mis-information > Helping to address concerns about potential liberal bias among fact-checkers, we also examined untrustworthiness ratings from politically-balanced crowds of demographically representative (quota-sampled) American laypeople recruited via Lucid (15), rather than professional fact-checkers.
- jonathan-adly 5y ago
  I am not sure why are you downvoted. But yes, who labels what's harmful misinformation and what is a legitimate dissenting voice is a big factor and the source of bias. Zoom away from the polarizing US "current thing" BS politics and it becomes even clearer. Things like ESG, Nuclear energy, Middle Eastern conflicts, religious freedoms, criticizing China, etc. The world is mostly gray, and whoever sets the boundaries of good/bad is king (that's why Media is valuable to billionaires and dictators).
- skoskie 5y ago
  Chronology matters here. Any conspiracy theory, no matter how seemingly unhinged could become factual in time. And when you spew misinformation and lies everyday you are bound to have some lies eventually emerge as truth. None of that should lend credibility to the people who found themselves eventually and accidentally speaking the truth. > The key here is who is defining misinformation. We should respect the processes that are used to establish truthful information, even if it is occasionally wrong, rather than the noise makers who are occasionally right. In other words “who” should not be a factor in determining misinformation, but “how”.

agomez314 5y ago

From reading the abstract, it seems like an exercise in circular logic.

olsonjeffery 5y ago
Please expand upon this argument.
- laverya 5y ago
  "Republican leaning users were banned ~5x more often than Democratic leaning users, but they also shared misinformation more as decided by we-promise-they're-neutral fact checkers and the average American, so there's no discrimination against Republican leaning users" Which to me means "there's no discrimination unless the fact checkers and average American discriminate", also known as "there's no discrimination unless there's discrimination", which is circular logic.
  - alwayseasy 5y ago
    Claiming misinformation and opinion should be treated as equals is probably the problem. Most open democracies have agreed misinformation can't be treated equally.
    - JMS2021 5y ago
      Hunter Bidens laptop was fact checked by various outlets but we found out later that was a lie. Who owns the fact checkers?
      - alphabettsy 5y ago
        You mean the claims being made by the Trump camp were unsubstantiated? Because that happened and they were at the time.
      - belltaco 5y ago
        That's the exception that proves the rule. Fact checkers rarely can be wrong. The overwhelming amount of times they are very correct. If anyone thinks I am wrong, they can list a dozen times fact checkers were wrong.

nynx 5y ago

TwoNineA 5y ago
theknocker 5y ago
Proven 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
wincy 5y ago
twoxproblematic 5y ago

Tehchops 5y ago

I see disproportionate amount of violence/threats from right-leaning personas online. Perhaps that is a factor? Yes, I know it's anecdotal, but the LGBTQ+ community has been the victim of an increasing number of hate crimes(confirmed by law enforcement reporting), and the rhetoric online seems to mirror this. Free speech does not cover overt or implied violence based on sexual or gender identity.

_-david-_ 5y ago
Do you have any evidence that it is disproportionately coming from the right? I see a lot more coming from the left so it seems a bit anecdotal.
- jandrese 5y ago
  Can you post any link to left leaning people calling for violence against LGBTQ aligned individuals?
  - _-david-_ 5y ago
    I'm not sure I could easily find an example but there have been some lesbians who had calls of violence against them because they are a so called TERF. I was, however, talking about general calls to violence not specifically against LGBT people. The first paragraph from the post I was replying to made no mention of LGBT. I should have quoted that part to make it more clear what exactly I was talking about. Sorry about the confusion.
- danaris 5y ago
  Well, let's see here. We have one "side" publicly and loudly proclaiming the same things as racist lynch mobs from the 1800s and literal Nazis. We have another "side" publicly and loudly calling for dignity and respect for every human being. It would seem logical to me that the burden of proof here would be on the person claiming that the latter is sending more hate and death threats than the former. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

pphysch 5y ago

"Instead, the observed asymmetry could be explained entirely by the tendency of Republicans to share more misinformation." ...misinformation defined by whom? Factually speaking, the vast bulk of the "Russiagate" scandal was a hoax designed to achieve a political agenda, pure and simple. Trump may be as corrupt as the next guy, but there is no evidence that implicates him as a Russian asset. But who was removed from social media for boosting this blatant misinformation? Literally no one.

olsonjeffery 5y ago
If you read the study you would know the answer, because they literally define the very thing you’re asking about. As helpfully posted elsewhere in this thread: > Helping to address concerns about potential liberal bias among fact-checkers, we also examined untrustworthiness ratings from politically-balanced crowds of demographically representative (quota-sampled) American laypeople recruited via Lucid (15), rather than professional fact-checkers.
- pphysch 5y ago
  The study pivots around popular perceptions of QAnon/Pizzagate as the archetype of "misinformation" and has zero mention of its political mirror-image, Russiagate. Both are false and ridiculous conspiracy theories aimed at defaming the opposing leadership. By omitting one of the two elephants (donkeys?) in the room, it has hard to take this study seriously. Very poor experimental design.
alphabettsy 5y ago
Didn’t the Trump Camp lie about meeting with Russian operatives? Didn’t people end up in jail for lying and refusing to cooperate? It was absolutely political, but isn’t anything concerning an investigation of a sitting President?
- pphysch 5y ago
  The bottom line is that the Steele Dossier was a QAnon-tier piece of disinformation, yet was endlessly paraded as "mostly true" by establishment media. That is an unexcusable double standard.

Sohurt00 5y ago

JohnClark1337 5y ago

jonathan-adly 5y ago

Basically whoever gets to labels what's harmful misinformation and what is a legitimate dissenting voice is the source of bias. Everything else is noise. The study is a great example of that noise. Zoom away from the polarizing US "current thing" BS politics and it becomes even clearer. Things like ESG, Nuclear energy, Middle Eastern conflicts, religious freedoms, criticizing China, etc. The world is mostly gray, and whoever sets the boundaries of good/bad is king (that's why Media is valuable to billionaires and dictators).

busterarm 5y ago
This is why the Saudi leadership invests so heavily in companies like Twitter and other media companies.
silicon2401 5y ago
> whoever gets to labels what's harmful misinformation and what is a legitimate dissenting voice is the source of bias "misinformation" is the cleverest weapon against free speech in a while, despite being an old trick. It lets people support censorship while feeling like they're just opposing something evil. Catholic Europe said "heresy" or "blasphemy", McCarthyist USA said "communist", Islamic societies said "haram", secular dictatorships said "degenerate", etc etc.

padobson 5y ago

I'd like to see a study that correlates use of Twitter's "report" button with political persuasion. My hypothesis is that lefties are more likely to appeal to authority and hit the "report" button when they see something they don't like, and right wingers are more likely to go vigilante and hit "reply" and attempt to persuade/shout the person into agreeing with them.

orwin 5y ago
I don't think you know a lot of lefties, or that your lefties are at worst socdems (barely leftwing)
ddingus 5y ago
I break it down on authoritarian lines. Left, right, indie are a separate thing. Authoritarians do these things most often: Brigade, mass report, preemptive blocks, use of lists. Malicious Compliance and or using, gaming rules to get other people into problem positions. Tribe vs tribe, guilty by association, and or forcing others into false choice scenarios. Mixing authoritarianism with political alignment complicates things unnecessarily in my view. There can be poor quality people favoring any ideology, and or multiple ones, same as there can be better quality people. I urge you to give it some thought. You may find it helps to understand others better.

thorAway007 5y ago

zmibes 5y ago

Might as well ask the Catholic church to conduct a study into whether God exists. (They are the experts, right?)