Trade-offs between reducing misinformation and politically-balanced enforcement on social media

In response to intense pressure from policy makers and the public, technology companies have enacted a range of policies aimed at reducing the spread of misinformation online. The enforcement of these policies has, however, led to technology companies being regularly accused of political bias. We argue that even under politically neutral anti-misinformation policies, such political asymmetries in enforcement should be expected, as there is a political asymmetry in the sharing of misinformation. We support this argument with an analysis of Twitter data from 9,000 politically active users during the U.S. 2020 presidential election. While Republicans were indeed substantially more likely to be suspended than Democrats, the Republicans also shared far more links to low quality news sites – even when news quality was determined by politically-balanced groups of laypeople, or groups of only Republicans – and were estimated to have a far higher likelihood of being bots. We also find widespread evidence of ideological asymmetries when analyzing sharing intentions data from 8,597 people across 16 countries. These results demonstrate that social media platforms face a trade-off between effectively reducing the spread of misinformation and maintaining political balance in enforcement.

Mosleh, M., Yang, Q., Zaman, T., Pennycook, G., & Rand, D. G. (2022, April 8). Trade-offs between reducing misinformation and politically-balanced enforcement on social media. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/ay9q5