Is Twitter biased against conservatives? A Study

[jonathan-adly]

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).

[silicon2401]

> 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.

[busterarm]

This is why the Saudi leadership invests so heavily in companies like Twitter and other media companies.

[pphysch]

"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.

[alphabettsy]

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?

[olsonjeffery]

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.

[agomez314]

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

[olsonjeffery]

Please expand upon this argument.

[zmibes]

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

[yablak]

"... 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]

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.

[Tehchops]

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-_]

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.

[padobson]

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.

[ddingus]

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.

[orwin]

I don't think you know a lot of lefties, or that your lefties are at worst socdems (barely leftwing)