Given the rapid changes to news, social media and information sharing, you’d think there’d be more support for studying how people learn about the world. Instead, critics are wrongly conflating their work with censorship.
In the New York Post, for example, a story hammered a group of psychologists as concocting “fake science” to justify censorship. Their paper, published in the Nature, hit a nerve. Conservatives were found to share more information from low-quality news sites on social media than liberals did.
While the idea of news quality sounds subjective and prone to bias, the scholars didn’t make that judgement themselves. They asked three groups to weigh in: professional fact checkers, a politically mixed group of laypeople and a group of Republicans.
Each group determined what was a high-quality source (a news organization that mostly gets it right, but can sometimes make mistakes) or a low-quality one (a publisher that tends to make things up). After each group determined what counted as low-quality news, the team looked at who typically shared that type of news.
Each time, they found that extreme partisans on both sides were more likely to share misleading content. And each time, those on the far right contributed more garbage.
The study doesn’t justify censorship of conservative views, although it does offer an explanation of why rightist social media accounts are more likely to be suspended.
Edward Tenner, a historian and lecturer on technology and culture, explained to me that the pushback against the paper could be what’s known as ‘reactance’—a tendency for people, when told they’re wrong, to double down. Stirring up antipathy is an occupational hazard for people who study misinformation, rumours, pseudoscience and quackery.
Also, many people don’t mind lies; they only abhor lies spread by their political opponents. In an article in The Ohio Capital Journal, Minjae Kim, an assistant professor of management at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University, called this acceptance of certain lies “moral flexibility.”
Citing research, he wrote that some supporters of former US President Donald Trump recognized that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, but justified Trump’s claims to the contrary because they believed “the political system is illegitimate and stacked against their interests.”
And people on the left didn’t seem upset with President Biden’s erroneous 2021 claims that people vaccinated against covid couldn’t spread the disease.
That had been the hope, of course, but the Delta variant had already shown that not to be the case. Partisans may have taken Biden’s false statement as acceptable.
Tenner considers the relevance here of the Italian saying, “Se non è vero, è ben trovato”—even if it is not true, it is a good fabrication, or good story. That’s attributed to 16th century philosopher Giordano Bruno who had some forward-thinking ideas and was burned at the stake.
The expression might describe the way J.D. Vance reacted to Donald Trump’s statement that immigrants in Ohio were eating cats and dogs. There were no documented incidents of such activity, but Vance attempted justify the rumour by saying that it called attention to problems of immigration.
Social media algorithms tend to amplify such wild stories. Yet, there are ways to moderate the information stream other than taking things down.
“Part of the research that we’re doing right now is to develop models so that we can evaluate intended and unintended consequence of different moderation schemes,” said Filippo Menczer, a professor of informatics and computer science at Indiana University. But he said these efforts have gotten much harder. Meta and X have also restricted data access to many researchers.
Instead of deleting posts or ‘shadow banning’ users who express non-mainstream views, social media firms can fight incorrect or disputed information with added information.
In dynamic areas such as science and medicine, moderation should be transparent because fact-checkers may mistake legitimate minority opinion and insightful dissent for misinformation. In some tests, the “community notes” feature on X helped diffuse medical falsehoods.
Picking fights with scientists won’t solve information problems. A more consistent view for those who are pro-free speech and anti-censorship would be to embrace free inquiry into our information ecosystems— and to applaud those who scrutinize the algorithms that influence what we think and how we vote. ©bloomberg