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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


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.

“Accusations of political bias are often based largely on anecdotes or noteworthy cases, such as the suspension from Twitter and Facebook of former President Trump,” said MIT Sloan professor Rand. 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. “The social media users analyzed in this research are not representative of Americans more broadly, so these findings do not necessarily mean that conservatives in general are more likely to spread misinformation than liberals.

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