The key here is who is defining misinformation. As the COVID lab leak and Hunter Biden laptop story show there has been a tendency to loudly dismiss or condemn any dissenting opinions of those that don't align with the mainstream narrative as "misinformation". Only to subsequently find out later that these were not as far fetched or misinformed as previously believed.
And the Russian DNC hack. Crowdstrike's President told the public one thing and then testified to the House Intelligence Committee that there's no evidence of Russian involvement.
This didn't seem to stop multiple MSNBC hosts from shouting about Russian election meddling, long after the Justice Department dropped such claims and related charges.
I’m not sure why you have been downvoted. It may be true that the Republicans share information from sketchier sources, but the Hunter Biden laptop story suppression was so bad that I don’t think Democrats have a leg to stand on here. The message that it was “Russian disinformation” was completely evidence-free and baseless, and the fact that Twitter blocked the URL was a clear signal that the standards for different political views is different.
I think the conclusions of the paper probably stand, but a more rigorous analysis will need to address this.
Fact-checkers have occasionally made serious errors, and in other cases made arbitrary, premature, or flimsy judgments of ambiguous situations, essentially passing off opinion as fact. From what I've seen, these errors and arbitrary judgments tend to favor the liberal side. Scholars will need to remove these errors and arbitrary judgment calls from the "misinformation score" and see whether there continues to be a big partisan gap.
Again, my gut feeling is that the conclusions wouldn't be changed much. There's plenty of genuine right-wing misinformation out there that isn't tied to erroneous or opinion-based fact-checking. But a paper like this really needs to get down to brass tacks about what exactly is being called misinformation, or it will only be yet more ammunition for political and culture wars, and won't provide any scientific enlightenment.
I suspect that certain segments of the left would also be somewhat vindicated by a more serious and detailed review of what is deemed misinformation. Dissenters on all sides are at least sometimes unfairly treated by the mainstream fact-checking institutions.
You can’t “remove” those errors — they are likely the primary cause of the perceived gap. I think that fact checkers and related orgs are mostly correct, but where there is room for interpretation and when mistakes are made they happen with a strong bias in one direction. Removing those is basically just pruning “outliers” in dataset that don’t support the conclusion you’d like to make.
> You can’t “remove” those errors — they are likely the primary cause of the perceived gap.
I think you can fix the errors and exclude more opinion-based "fact checks" if you review the underlying data carefully and transparently. Whether those fixes and exclusions close the gap is currently a matter of opinion, and I think we should try to do better than just everyone just having their own opinions on it. That's my whole point.
If your tweet was censored or your account was banned on the basis of an opinion-based fact check, what difference does it make? The enforcement action was still taken.
It’s like saying that all police action in the United States is righteous and legitimate (you simply need to exclude all actions which are not). What is the value of such a tautological study/statement?
>I suspect that certain segments of the left would also be somewhat vindicated by a more serious and detailed review of what is deemed misinformation.
"Certain segments of the left" still believe that the Russians have a video of hookers peeing on Trump that they're using to puppeteer him to their own needs. The left has no business lecturing anyone about misinformation.
> Russians have a video of hookers peeing on Trump
That wasn't the actual claim, it was that the hookers were peeing on the bed in the hotel room with Trump.
(The actual interesting bit was that a video appearing to be that did turn up, and after examination, turned out to be a fake that someone put a considerable amount of effort into. I do wonder who, and what they were hoping to accomplish with it).
We should now have clear enough evidence to impeach Hunter Biden. Or at least we could fire him from his government position.
For what it is worth, the laptop is far from the smoking gun people seem to think it is. The data is a mess and the story of how the data was acquired still makes no sense. The only thing that has been verified so far is that some of the emails did pass through GMail.
I’m aware it’s a mess and the story is crazy, but unless we have hard evidence that something is legitimately misinformation, especially when it comes from a mostly reputable news source (NYP), then it should not be suppressed. And importantly: this standard should be held consistently, regardless of who benefits politically.
The “left a laptop at a repair shop” part is of course bizarre, but makes about as much sense to me as anything else that Hunter seems to have done in his life.
It's not entirely a joke. Lets say the Hunter Biden story is true and he profited off of a Ukranian oil company. Why would it be a scandal? He is not in a position of trust with the government. Joe Biden didn't appoint him to his staff. The huge "gotcha" moment where they take down the entire Hunter Biden empire of deceit and corruption doesn't affect the public interest.
I’m not sure what you mean by “suppose”. Hunter Biden publicly served on the board of Burisma with compensation upwards of ~50k per month from 2014-2019 (while his father was Vice President). Joe Biden was sufficiently involved in Ukraine that Obama officials actually expressed concerns about a conflict of interest.
He was also on the board of BHR during the same period and acquired a significant stake at a discount. AKAIK, these facts are not in dispute.
The part that is potential scandalous (and disputed) is that he was in these positions to peddle influence with his father and even kicking back compensation with his fathers explicit knowledge and approval.
Joe Biden is in a position of trust in government, and the defense against this has basically been “I have no idea what Hunter was doing and those were legitimate business arrangements”. However, if that’s untrue then it is obviously influence peddling and scandalous. I’m not really taking a position here, but it makes no sense to claim that simply because Hunter Biden is not in government, this is irrelevant.
I am not sure why are you downvoted. But yes, who labels what's harmful misinformation and what is a legitimate dissenting voice is a big factor and the source of bias.
Zoom away from the polarizing US "current thing" BS politics and it becomes even clearer. Things like ESG, Nuclear energy, Middle Eastern conflicts, religious freedoms, criticizing China, etc.
The world is mostly gray, and whoever sets the boundaries of good/bad is king (that's why Media is valuable to billionaires and dictators).
As the paper says in respect of politically motivated definitions of mis-information
> Helping to address concerns about potential liberal bias among fact-checkers, we also examined untrustworthiness ratings from politically-balanced crowds of demographically representative (quota-sampled) American laypeople recruited via Lucid (15), rather than professional fact-checkers.
Lab leak hasn't been proven true, but hasn't been proven false. People were told they were spreading misinformation and xenophobia / racism if they talked about it.
Some portions of Hunter Biden laptop have been proven true (the emails on the laptop are legit) but people were banned for spreading hacked content (deapite it not being hacked) and spreading Russian disinformation.
The problem is the theory was just discounted right off the bat without any real reason other than conservatives said it. That is not an intellectually good argument. We should not be banning plausible theories unless we have actual evidence.
Was the theory discounted for no reason? I thought it was discounted because the evidence was weak at the time. Especially in comparison to how vigorously it was being pushed by politicos in power.
For example, if someone killed a bunch of people and the head of the FBI said, "A black guy is doing it!" with no real evidence then I think banning it might be more justified. Now it may turn out that a black guy is the one doing the killing, but that doesn't make the pronouncements of the FBI head justified (although I'm sure the FBI head would feel justified).
Who cares if the evidence is / was weak? They were censored for misinformation not because the evidence is weak. By that logic your post should be censored since your evidence that it was censored for being weak is in fact weak evidence.
We are not talking about the head of the FBI. If the head of the CDC said something like this you may be have a better comparison. Even if the CDC said something like this it wouldn't impact health so it probably shouldn't even count as harmful content.
The burden on proof is on the people doing the censoring. If they wanna censor one theory they need do disprove it or prove another one. And this goes for all subjects, not just 'rona.
The NYT article seemed to indicate emails along with a cache of files were authenticated. I am not sure if only one was actually authenticated and people are assuming all of them were or not.
Chronology matters here. Any conspiracy theory, no matter how seemingly unhinged could become factual in time. And when you spew misinformation and lies everyday you are bound to have some lies eventually emerge as truth. None of that should lend credibility to the people who found themselves eventually and accidentally speaking the truth.
> The key here is who is defining misinformation.
We should respect the processes that are used to establish truthful information, even if it is occasionally wrong, rather than the noise makers who are occasionally right.
In other words “who” should not be a factor in determining misinformation, but “how”.
