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"... the observation that Republicans were more likely to be suspended than Democrats provides no support for the claim that Twitter showed political bias in

by yablak 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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-_ 4y 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 4y ago
      - sintaxi 4y ago
        dragonwriter 4y 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 4y 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-_ 4y 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 4y 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-_ 4y ago
        The problem is the theory was just discounted right off the bat without any real reason other than conservatives said it. That is not an intellectually good argument. We should not be banning plausible theories unless we have actual evidence.
        kenjackson 4y ago
        Was the theory discounted for no reason? I thought it was discounted because the evidence was weak at the time. Especially in comparison to how vigorously it was being pushed by politicos in power. For example, if someone killed a bunch of people and the head of the FBI said, "A black guy is doing it!" with no real evidence then I think banning it might be more justified. Now it may turn out that a black guy is the one doing the killing, but that doesn't make the pronouncements of the FBI head justified (although I'm sure the FBI head would feel justified).
        _-david-_ 4y ago
        Who cares if the evidence is / was weak? They were censored for misinformation not because the evidence is weak. By that logic your post should be censored since your evidence that it was censored for being weak is in fact weak evidence. We are not talking about the head of the FBI. If the head of the CDC said something like this you may be have a better comparison. Even if the CDC said something like this it wouldn't impact health so it probably shouldn't even count as harmful content.
        alphabettsy 4y ago
        Who was censored regarding the lab leak theory?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- busterarm 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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.
      - 4y ago
- jandrese 4y ago
  The study defined misinformation as links to articles that were deemed to be false by fact checkers.
- lambada 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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”.

by yablak 4y ago

DamnYuppie 4y 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 4y 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-_ 4y 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 4y ago
    - sintaxi 4y ago
      - dragonwriter 4y 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 4y 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-_ 4y 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 4y 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-_ 4y ago
      The problem is the theory was just discounted right off the bat without any real reason other than conservatives said it. That is not an intellectually good argument. We should not be banning plausible theories unless we have actual evidence.
      - kenjackson 4y ago
        Was the theory discounted for no reason? I thought it was discounted because the evidence was weak at the time. Especially in comparison to how vigorously it was being pushed by politicos in power. For example, if someone killed a bunch of people and the head of the FBI said, "A black guy is doing it!" with no real evidence then I think banning it might be more justified. Now it may turn out that a black guy is the one doing the killing, but that doesn't make the pronouncements of the FBI head justified (although I'm sure the FBI head would feel justified).
        _-david-_ 4y ago
        Who cares if the evidence is / was weak? They were censored for misinformation not because the evidence is weak. By that logic your post should be censored since your evidence that it was censored for being weak is in fact weak evidence. We are not talking about the head of the FBI. If the head of the CDC said something like this you may be have a better comparison. Even if the CDC said something like this it wouldn't impact health so it probably shouldn't even count as harmful content.
        alphabettsy 4y ago
        Who was censored regarding the lab leak theory?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
busterarm 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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.
    - 4y ago
jandrese 4y ago
The study defined misinformation as links to articles that were deemed to be false by fact checkers.
lambada 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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”.