Politically conservative users tend to share misinformation at a greater volume than politically liberal users — This could explain why conservatives were suspended more frequently by platforms: Nature paper

in other news, water is wet.

Excerpts from [summary](https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/social-media-users-actions-rather-than-biased-policies-could-drive-differences-in-platform-enforcement/) by Mohsen Mosleh, re. Nature [paper](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07942-8):

*New research from a team of US and UK researchers has found that politically conservative users tend to share misinformation at a greater volume than politically liberal users and this could explain why conservatives were suspended more frequently — thus an asymmetry in sanctions is not evidence of biased policies on the part of social media companies.*

*In their new paper, “Differences in misinformation sharing can lead to politically asymmetric sanctions,” published today in Nature, the researchers suggests that the higher quantity of social media policy enforcement (such as account suspensions) for conservative users could be explained by the higher quantity of misinformation shared by those conservative users — and so does not constitute evidence of inherent biases in the policies from social media companies or in the definition of what constitutes misinformation.*

*Written by researchers from MIT Sloan School of Management, the University of Oxford, Cornell University, and Yale University, co-authors of the paper include Mohsen Mosleh, Qi Yang, Tauhid Zaman, Gordon Pennycook and David G. Rand.*

 

*[…] To better understand this difference, the researchers examined what content was shared by these politically active Twitter users in terms of the reliability of the sources through two different methods.*

*They used a set of 60 news domains (the 20 highest volume sites within the categories of mainstream, hyper-partisan and fake news), and collected trustworthiness ratings for each domain from eight professional fact-checkers.*

*In an effort to eliminate concern about potential bias on the part of journalists and fact-checkers, the researchers also collected ratings from politically-balanced groups of laypeople. Both approaches indicated that people who used Trump hashtags shared four times more links to low-quality news outlets than those who used Biden hashtags.*

*[…] The study also discovered similar associations between conservatism and low-quality news sharing (based on both expert and politically-balanced layperson ratings) were present in seven other datasets from Twitter, Facebook, and survey experiments, spanning 2016 to 2023 and including data from 16 different countries.*

This raises an important question about LLMs political bias. Given that LLMs are trained on these data, and that conservatives are either less active or share low-quality posts like this study days, could this result into LLMs being politically biased on the left?

We know as a fact that most LLMs are already left-leaning, including ironically X’s Grok. Could this be why?

Ain’t that the freakin truth!

I’m currently writing my PhD Thesis on the amazing effect that happens when I place my full body weight on the surface of the earth.

It stays solid and holds me.

I’m not sure how to get this amazing data out to the rest of the world though so I’ll probably just write a paper on the Internet.

The US needs stricter misinformation laws.

and i more frequently report misinfo on platforms.

I’m a total lefty, and I think we should consider that all people are susceptible to share misinformation.

That’s not the only reason they tend to get suspended. They’re also more likely to make violent threats or violence inciting speech.

Dumb people believe dumber things.

They call it free speech. We call it liar liar pants on fire.