Have you considered that, especially immediately after the election, one side of the political spectrum was propagating much more misinformation than the other?
Yes, considering that it's the entire thesis of the study and how they try to claim there's no ideological bias.
Do I really have to explain why this is ridiculous on HN? No censorship regime has ever said "we are censoring this because we're ideologically opposed to it". There are always other justifications, often paper thin but they exist. A common excuse is that anyone making the government look bad is "spreading rumours", for example (China uses this one a lot). In the west, it's that exactly the same except they use the word misinformation rather than rumours.
The study in question is nonsensical - like all other such studies - because it claims that people are getting banned for spreading "misinformation" and not being conservative, but doesn't have any rigorous definition of what misinformation is. Instead they asked a bunch of self-proclaimed "fact checkers" (i.e. the people tasked with enforcement of ideological orthodoxy), and as a backup measure picked QAnon and said, that's misinformation (all of it).
Is QAnon misinformation? Yes, it is. Nonetheless it's obviously not a complete definition of the problem. I'm not American but I recall very well that after Trump won that for years there was a massive, organized misinformation campaign claiming that Trump was a secret Russian agent. If they'd included that particular conspiracy theory into their definition they'd have found that there were lots of Democrats spreading misinformation too, but they didn't, because that would have defeated their goal (the production of ideological propaganda useful for political talking points like the one you just raised).
If you're going to try and claim your political opponents are generically less honest than you are in politics, that's one thing. But when people who claim to be scientists do it, and they use the exact same tactics, that just degrades science. It's not actual research of the sort that arises from some coherent theory of the world and which can be neutrally tested. It's simply "how can we prove that Republicans are evil today?".
native_samples|3 years ago
Do I really have to explain why this is ridiculous on HN? No censorship regime has ever said "we are censoring this because we're ideologically opposed to it". There are always other justifications, often paper thin but they exist. A common excuse is that anyone making the government look bad is "spreading rumours", for example (China uses this one a lot). In the west, it's that exactly the same except they use the word misinformation rather than rumours.
The study in question is nonsensical - like all other such studies - because it claims that people are getting banned for spreading "misinformation" and not being conservative, but doesn't have any rigorous definition of what misinformation is. Instead they asked a bunch of self-proclaimed "fact checkers" (i.e. the people tasked with enforcement of ideological orthodoxy), and as a backup measure picked QAnon and said, that's misinformation (all of it).
Is QAnon misinformation? Yes, it is. Nonetheless it's obviously not a complete definition of the problem. I'm not American but I recall very well that after Trump won that for years there was a massive, organized misinformation campaign claiming that Trump was a secret Russian agent. If they'd included that particular conspiracy theory into their definition they'd have found that there were lots of Democrats spreading misinformation too, but they didn't, because that would have defeated their goal (the production of ideological propaganda useful for political talking points like the one you just raised).
If you're going to try and claim your political opponents are generically less honest than you are in politics, that's one thing. But when people who claim to be scientists do it, and they use the exact same tactics, that just degrades science. It's not actual research of the sort that arises from some coherent theory of the world and which can be neutrally tested. It's simply "how can we prove that Republicans are evil today?".