Posted on 11/04/2023 6:23:37 AM PDT by DoodleBob
Misinformation is a key global threat, but Democrats and Republicans disagree about how to address the problem. In particular, Democrats and Republicans diverge sharply on removing misinformation from social media.
Only three weeks after the Biden administration announced the Disinformation Governance Board in April 2022, the effort to develop best practices for countering disinformation was halted because of Republican concerns about its mission. Why do Democrats and Republicans have such different attitudes about content moderation?
My colleagues Jennifer Pan and Margaret E. Roberts and I found in a study published in the journal Science Advances that Democrats and Republicans not only disagree about what is true or false, they also differ in their internalized preferences for content moderation. Internalized preferences may be related to people’s moral values, identities or other psychological factors, or people internalizing the preferences of party elites.
And though people are sometimes strategic about wanting misinformation that counters their political views removed, internalized preferences are a much larger factor in the differing attitudes toward content moderation.
In our study, we found that Democrats are about twice as likely as Republicans to want to remove misinformation, while Republicans are about twice as likely as Democrats to consider removal of misinformation as censorship. Democrats’ attitudes might depend somewhat on whether the content aligns with their own political views, but this seems to be due, at least in part, to different perceptions of accuracy.
Previous research showed that Democrats and Republicans have different views about content moderation of misinformation. One of the most prominent explanations is the “fact gap”: the difference in what Democrats and Republicans believe is true or false. For example, a study found that both Democrats and Republicans were more likely to believe news headlines that were aligned with their own political views.
But it is unlikely that the fact gap alone can explain the huge differences in content moderation attitudes. That’s why we set out to study two other factors that might lead Democrats and Republicans to have different attitudes: preference gap and party promotion. A preference gap is a difference in internalized preferences about whether, and what, content should be removed. Party promotion is a person making content moderation decisions based on whether the content aligns with their partisan views.
We asked 1,120 U.S. survey respondents who identified as either Democrat or Republican about their opinions on a set of political headlines that we identified as misinformation based on a bipartisan fact check. Each respondent saw one headline that was aligned with their own political views and one headline that was misaligned. After each headline, the respondent answered whether they would want the social media company to remove the headline, whether they would consider it censorship if the social media platform removed the headline, whether they would report the headline as harmful, and how accurate the headline was.
When we compared how Democrats and Republicans would deal with headlines overall, we found strong evidence for a preference gap. Overall, 69% of Democrats said misinformation headlines in our study should be removed, but only 34% of Republicans said the same; 49% of Democrats considered the misinformation headlines harmful, but only 27% of Republicans said the same; and 65% of Republicans considered headline removal to be censorship, but only 29% of Democrats said the same.
Even in cases where Democrats and Republicans agreed that the same headlines were inaccurate, Democrats were nearly twice as likely as Republicans to want to remove the content, while Republicans were nearly twice as likely as Democrats to consider removal censorship.
We didn’t test explicitly why Democrats and Republicans have such different internalized preferences, but there are at least two possible reasons. First, Democrats and Republicans might differ in factors like their moral values or identities. Second, Democrats and Republicans might internalize what the elites in their parties signal. For example, Republican elites have recently framed content moderation as a free speech and censorship issue. Republicans might use these elites’ preferences to inform their own.
When we zoomed in on headlines that are either aligned or misaligned for Democrats, we found a party promotion effect: Democrats were less favorable to content moderation when misinformation aligned with their own views. Democrats were 11% less likely to want the social media company to remove headlines that aligned with their own political views. They were 13% less likely to report headlines that aligned with their own views as harmful. We didn’t find a similar effect for Republicans.
Our study shows that party promotion may be partly due to different perceptions of accuracy of the headlines. When we looked only at Democrats who agreed with our statement that the headlines were false, the party promotion effect was reduced to 7%.
We find it encouraging that the effect of party promotion is much smaller than the effect of internalized preferences, especially when accounting for accuracy perceptions. However, given the huge partisan differences in content moderation preferences, we believe that social media companies should look beyond the fact gap when designing content moderation policies that aim for bipartisan support.
Future research could explore whether getting Democrats and Republicans to agree on moderation processes – rather than moderation of individual pieces of content – could reduce disagreement. Also, other types of content moderation such as downweighting, which involves platforms reducing the virality of certain content, might prove to be less contentious. Finally, if the preference gap – the differences in deep-seated preferences between Democrats and Republicans – is rooted in value differences, platforms could try to use different moral framings to appeal to people on both sides of the partisan divide.
For now, Democrats and Republicans are likely to continue to disagree over whether removing misinformation from social media improves public discourse or amounts to censorship.
Right now, we really need the “misinformation” removed from crap joints like SeeBS, CNN, AP, abc, NPR, NBC, the WAPO, the New Yawk Slimes, USA Today and the rest of the far left “mainstream media”.
The difference is controlled speech vs the 1st.
Look up the author. It’s some millennial girl from Stanford. She’s the type at thanksgiving dinner that comes home from college and has so much to teach the family. /s
She’s a little jacobin that simply does not recognize the right to free speech unless you say what she agrees with.
Can anyone imagine Mr Stanford seeing the Marxist redfem clowns operating in his name?
Look up the author. It’s some millennial girl from Stanford. She’s the type at thanksgiving dinner that comes home from college and has so much to teach the family. /s
She’s a little jacobin that simply does not recognize the right to free speech unless you say what she agrees with.
Can anyone imagine Mr Stanford seeing the Marxist redfem clowns operating in his name?
Never accept the premise of an election theft-denying fascist.
“The only way to make a bad idea seem like a good idea is to silence the good idea that shows just how bad the bad idea really is” L.Star
I consider myself a ‘Classic Liberal’ sort of a hippie. Where are all my old friends now? Seems they were just following the flavor of the day, no real convictions.
As for ‘misinformation’, Judge Brandeis:
The best remedy to combat harmful speech is more speech not enforced silence.
God gave us free will.
There is no governmental mandate - legal or otherwise - to remove misinformation.
Perhaps the only good thing to come from the pandemic, is that the MSM and medical-industrial complex destroyed any remaining credibility they had. At this point, pretty much everyone knows they are lying when they open their mouths. What’s remaining is a retinue of leftists who wield the “misinformation” label like it’s something new or a Russian bot that must be controlled.
The young author clearly is “concerned.” But at least she published a piece that shines light on the pole-shifting. The Brandy Zardrozny’s of the world would doxx the academic behind the study.
It’s kinda fun watching them gasp for air as they swirl around the drain. Go ahead….publish all the lies and misinformation you want. I’ll keep pointing out to family and friends their lies when asked and eat popcorn.
This is typical leftist pseudo analysis. They talk around the issue and cast it in the context that what they think “misinformation” is truly “misinformation”. We’ve seen how the leftist and statist media treat information they don’t like casting it as “misinformation” while parroting as truth absolute lies and foolishness. Should we agree that gender is indeterminate and its misinformation to suggest that kids shouldn’t be transitioned? Issue after issue where differences of personal and scientific information diverge, truth seekers will always be on the losing side if the left, establishment, and statists can remove “misinformation”. We also know without a doubt that the terrorists like Hamas would not have their misinformation removed.
...they’re now “the party of experts shushing the world.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Darned if that isn’t spot on.
Conservatives are bombarded 25/7 with leftist propaganda. They don’t see any significant benefit to banning it on a few Internet platforms. On the other hand they are excluded from the MSM and their best outlet now is alternative media, and the banning has been from the leftist side. There is no downside to them to limit banning.
And of course the 20 ton elephant in the living room with sparklers in its ears and lasers shooting out of its butt is the left’s Russia Russia Russia hoax, which was the biggest and worst example of misinformation pretty much ever.
We can’t have a serious discussion about misinformation until liberals admit that they’re guilty of perpetrating one of the worst acts of misinformation in, like, history.
And the crux of the matter is just who is deciding what *misinformation* is.
And anyone who thinks that removing what THEY consider *misinformation* is a good thing or necessary is all inn favor of censorship.
Dee Dee Ramone was said to have been, or to have become, a Conservative.
Johnny Rotten (John Lydon) of the Sex Pistols stated publicly that he voted for Donald Trump, after saying earlier that he liked Barack Obama.
It’s not just about facts: Democrats and Republicans have sharply different attitudes about removing misinformation from social media
************************************************************
Just my two cents this Saturday morning: We NOW have “fake news” and we have “fake” Republicans”. So, I don’t think saying “Democrats AND!! Republicans” is a TRUTHFUL/ACCURATE statement anymore.
The accurate way to say it would be “The Uni-Party” has sharply different attitudes about removing misinformation from social media.
I’m tiring of this so-called ‘discussion’.
The narrative is ‘misinformation on social media’.
What about the misinformation projected by the government and projected/repeated by msm?
There’s the answer. Period.
Exactly.
Speech and the press are guaranteed to be completely FREE.
They are not guaranteed to be TRUE.
Or non-deceptive, or deceptive, or illusory, or good, or evil, or controversial, or agreeable, or helpful.
The educated person must fish through tons and tons of written and spoken words and make up his own mind. Or he may ignore what is being said.
The government has NO ROLE in this process.
Don't know why people have a hard time understanding this.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.