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Below: Vice President Harris is ‘coming around’ to ‘Little Tech’s’ agenda. But first:
Why conservatives get suspended more than liberals on social media.
Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) revived claims that conservatives are being unfairly censored on social media in Tuesday's vice-presidential debate. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)
Late in Tuesday night’s vice-presidential debate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) dodged a question about whether he and running mate Donald Trump would accept the 2024 election results by pivoting to a favorite topic: what he called the “censorship” of Americans by social media companies, terming it “a much bigger threat to democracy.”
His statement drew on a years-long Republican contention that Silicon Valley tech giants have suppressed conservative views on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter. That narrative has underpinned congressional hearings, Republican fundraising campaigns, the dismantling of academic research centers, Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, state laws seeking to restrict online content moderation, and multiple lawsuits that reached the Supreme Court this year.
But is it true? Well, yes and no, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Conservatives and Trump supporters are indeed more likely to have their posts on major social media platforms taken down or their accounts suspended than are liberals and Joe Biden supporters, researchers from Oxford University, MIT and other institutions found. But that doesn’t necessarily mean content moderation is biased.
Rather, the study finds that conservative accounts may be more often sanctioned because they post more misinformation.
That might sound either obvious or disingenuous, depending on your point of view. But the study, whose lead author is Oxford Internet Institute professor Mohsen Mosleh, is actually neither.
The Nature paper is not the first to find that conservatives are more likely to share stories that have been debunked, or that originate from fake news sites or other sources deemed “low-quality.” One common objection to such studies is that defining what counts as misinformation can be subjective. For instance, if the fact-checkers skew liberal or the list of fake news sites skews conservative, that in itself could explain the discrepancy in sharing behavior.
But study co-author David G. Rand, an MIT computational social science professor, said his team found that conservatives share more falsehoods and low-quality information online even when you let groups of Republicans define what counts as false or low-quality.
A previous version of the study, which was published online in 2022 before undergoing peer review, focused largely on an analysis of 9,000 politically active Twitter users during the 2020 election. It found that accounts that shared pro-Trump hashtags were both more likely to post links to low-quality sites — including those purveying falsehoods about the election — and more likely to end up suspended than those that shared pro-Biden hashtags.
The study didn’t examine the reasons for suspension, so it’s not clear that the sharing of links to dubious sites was the cause — just that it was correlated. Social media companies can suspend accounts or take down posts for all sorts of reasons, including hate speech, targeted harassment of other users, or because they turn out to be bots.
Since then, Rand said the researchers have bolstered the core findings with seven other datasets examining Twitter users, Facebook users, and surveys from 16 countries spanning 2016 to 2023. Among other things, they found that conservatives from other countries also shared misinformation at higher rates than liberals in those counties.
The research doesn’t prove that social media companies are totally unbiased, Rand told Tech Brief.
What it shows is that conservatives would face more content moderation than liberals even if both the definition of misinformation and the enforcement of policies were politically neutral.
The Nature study “totally makes sense” and dovetails with previous findings, said Filippo Menczer, a computer science professor and director of Indiana University’s Social Media Observatory. His own past work has found that extreme partisans on both the right and the left share more information from low-credibility sources than moderates, but that the phenomenon is much more pronounced on the right than the left.
Given the findings, Menczer said, social media companies would have to be biased in favor of conservatives to sanction liberals at an equal rate.
The study published Wednesday in Nature doesn’t seek to explain why conservatives are more prone to traffic in falsehoods. And to what extent its findings hold true in 2024 is unclear.
Much of the analysis relies on data from an era when Facebook and Twitter were on high alert for falsehoods about both elections and, starting in 2020, the covid-19 pandemic.
Both sites have since eased their misinformation policies, and Musk has welcomed back previously suspended accounts since buying Twitter in 2022 and rebranding it X. Last month, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote a letter to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who has spearheaded the Republican crusade against content moderation, blaming the Biden administration for leaning on his company to police covid-19 content.
Rand said his study suggests those reversals may rest on a false premise.
Where social media companies once faced an outcry over their role in fueling falsehoods, it’s now “a much bigger threat to be yelled at for being anti-conservative than it is to be yelled at for letting misinformation spread,” he said.
As a result, he added, “a lot of tech companies are scared to touch anything related to anti-misinformation in this election run-up” — a concern given the sheer volume of misinformation being peddled.
From our notebooks
Vice President Harris is ‘coming around’ to ‘Little Tech’s’ agenda, venture capitalist says
"We're at the dawn of a brand-new platform. When that occurs, we have to make sure that there is space for the little guy. Even Google itself started in the shadow of Microsoft ... We have to make sure that the little start-ups have a voice." - Garry Tan (Video: Washington Post Live)
Garry Tan, the president and CEO of the prominent start-up incubator Y Combinator, said during a Post Live interview on Wednesday that he was “really heartened” by Harris’s recent signal of support for the cryptocurrency industry, our colleague Cat Zakrzewski reports for Tech Brief.
“From her time as a prosecutor in San Francisco, my sense is that she can be top cop Kamala,” Tan said. “I’m hopeful for her to sort of bring common sense to the nation.”
Tan’s support for Harris diverges from other tech investors, including Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, who said in a podcast this summer that Trump is the best candidate for “Little Tech,” a term venture capitalists coined to underscore their view of themselves as promoting start-ups rather than Big Tech companies.
Andreessen and Horowitz have expressed frustration with the Biden administration’s AI executive order and Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler, a Biden appointee who has sharply increased the agency’s actions against cryptocurrency companies.
“There’s a space for a big tent here,” Tan said. “We have lots of friends who are Republicans or supporting the Republican ticket.”
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