Conservatives, don't be alarmed. Censorship on social media is on the rise, a new study has found. But researchers say they have identified the problem and can help solve it.
you.
The study “found” that conservatives were more tolerant of social media outages simply because they shared more “misinformation.” What is the treatment?
Just mirror the determination of the mainstream media and “voila!” — you are completely free to express your opinion.
Oh, and researchers used “fact checkers” like Snopes.com to “prove” their thesis. (Never mind that the site's co-founder David Mickelson was suspended in 2021 for plagiarizing at least 54 articles.) Also, Snopes has proven in the past that some of its fact checks were false. Never mind that I had to confess.)
Just the facts, ma’am?
“Differences in the sharing of misinformation can lead to politically asymmetric sanctions,” the study was published Wednesday in the journal Nature. As reported by Phys.org, the paper
Because it suggests that more social media policy enforcement (e.g., account suspensions) against conservative users may be explained by more misinformation shared by those conservative users. , does not provide evidence of inherent bias in social media companies' policies. Or even in the definition of what constitutes misinformation.
The paper was written by researchers from the MIT Sloan School of Management, the University of Oxford, Cornell University, and Yale University, and co-authors include Mohsen Mosle, Qi Yang, Tawhid Zaman, Gordon Pennycook, and David Pennycook. Mr. G. Rand is listed.
… Many Americans who disagree on political issues agree that the sharing of false information is a serious problem. 65% of Americans say technology companies should take steps to limit the spread of false information. But there is significant disagreement over whether tech companies actually manage their platforms fairly.
Whose “facts”?
The researchers first looked at user suspensions by Twitter (now known as X) following the 2020 US presidential election. The researchers write:
In fact, we found that accounts that shared #Trump2020 during the election were 4.4 times more likely to be subsequently suspended than those that shared #VoteBidenHarris2020. Specifically, as of July 2021, only 4.5% of users who shared Biden hashtags were suspended, compared to 19.6% of users who shared Trump hashtags. Ta.
The paper then goes on to say the following (citing the 2016 and 2020 elections, as well as Donald Trump's first impeachment):
Those who used the Trump hashtag shared news from domains that were rated as significantly less trustworthy on average than those who used the Biden hashtag. For example, we use credibility ratings for 60 news domains (the 20 most voluminous sites within each category of mainstream news, bipartisan news, and fake news, as determined by fact-checkers and journalists).
MSN commenters on the Phys.org article were quick to identify the issue described above. For example, B Mill77 writes, “The part that always remains is who gets to decide what is false information and what is not.” “When you support left-leaning policies, we see factually inaccurate information being left out all the time. If you get caught, you get less attention and less attention.”
Consider the story of Hunter Biden's laptop. Mainstream media dubbed this the “Russian disinfo,” based on the official disinfo from U.S. intelligence agencies. Social media then suppressed the New York Post article just before the 2020 election. Oh, and even the New York Times would eventually confirm that it was accurate, which was very convenient after the election. Note: The poll found that 16% of people who voted for Biden would have reconsidered their vote if they had known the truth. Therefore, you should ask questions such as:
Where were the “fact checkers” when it mattered?
quality?
where? Apparently they're busy compiling biased reviews of high-quality news sites. Consider some of the sites that Nature clearly lists as “low quality.”
foxnews.com. breitbart.com nypost.com dailymail.co.uk. dailycaller.com.
And these are clearly some of the “high quality sites” in this study.
nytimes.com. cnn.com. rawstory.com. CBSNews.com. usatoday.com.
(Incidentally, I'm sure these truth police types would also label The New American as a “low-quality site.”)
As for CNN, it had to pay a huge settlement for defamation of a minor, and some of its celebrities admitted that the report on collusion between Trump and Russia that the network had been promoting was nonsense. I want you to know that I was caught on video. It's also worth noting that the Nature study lists Snopes and PolitiFact as two “professional fact-checkers” it trusted to investigate Twitter's false claims. But these two organizations, along with CNN and USA Today, both have false fact-checks. In some cases, these organizations have actually had to retract their claims. Notably, both Snopes and USA Today have previously claimed that the coronavirus lab leak theory is not true.
we are all fact checkers
In fact, part of the problem lies in the concept of “professional fact checkers” used by the study authors. What exactly does this mean?
If they mean to perform the job as a “profession,” that's another thing. In that case, it would be the same as saying that fortune telling is operated by a “professional psychic.” Unless it has implications for someone who is unique in the business of discerning truth. In this case, reasons and recent history indicate that the label itself is misinformation.
In fact, I and most people in the media would call ourselves fact checkers. We claim to expose falsehoods and reveal truth. The only difference is that some of us are honest and some of us are not. Some of us are insightful and some of us are not. Some of us love truth (objective by definition), while others deny the existence of truth.
Again, the irony is that people like the study authors would scoff at the concept of papal infallibility. But they also imply that some completely secular entities are certainly close enough to constitute a Ministry of Truth. In fact, the researchers go so far as to say that the study proves why social media should not stop censoring misinformation.
But even Harvard University's “fraudulent researchers” were accused of fraud. This is no surprise either. In 2013, The Economist reported the shocking finding that more than three-quarters of research studies in many fields fail. And all this raises the question:
We should implement censorship based on supposedly fake science designed to honor fake governments and justify fake news, ultimately leading to very real tyranny. Will it be produced?
