Comment by native_samples | Hacker News Reader

Comment by native_samples | Hacker News Reader

This is one of a recent run of hilarious attempts to claim that anti-conservative bias on social networks (or alternatively, enforcement of left wing orthodoxy), doesn't really exist at all. This one is especially entertaining for the pretzel-like contortions the authors go through.

> it’s become a key part of “the narrative” that social media websites have an “anti-conservative bias” in how they moderate. As we’ve pointed out over and over again there remains little evidence to support this.

From the study they're linking to:

> We then investigated potential political bias in suspension patterns and identified a set of 9,000 politically engaged Twitter users, half Democratic and half Republican, in October 2020, and followed them through the six months after the U.S. 2020 election. During that period, while only 7.7% of the Democratic users were suspended, 35.6% of the Republican users were suspended

It literally shows Republicans getting suspended at drastically higher rates than Democrats but, according to TechDirt, there is no evidence of any anti-conservative bias anywhere. It's just a fantasy. Because, see, social media platforms aren't biased against conservatives, just people who are 'wrong' about politics, which is totally different! The study is exactly the kind of ideologically biased pseudo-science that makes the social sciences such a laughing stock. It's just a giant exercise in circular reasoning. Because social networks don't literally say they're banning people for ideological reasons, nobody is banned for ideological reasons. That's the study, in a nutshell.

You seem to ignore the possibility that those 35.6% deserved those suspensions.

Ignored, because neither article nor study provides any logical reason to believe that. The study is not a neutral study of misinformation (they never are). Instead it defines misinformation as anything wacky that only Republicans believe, then uses that as a justification for erasing them from the platforms.

The equivalent in the other direction would be if Elon Musk took over Twitter and then banned everyone who claimed at any point that lockdowns worked because they were spreading misinformation, whilst completely ignoring claims that COVID doesn't exist at all. It's absolutely truly that this is misinformation - just look at the total failure in Shanghai or the conspicuously missing evidence of impact from western lockdowns - but it would disproportionately affect Democrats if that was the only component of the definition.

Have you considered that, especially immediately after the election, one side of the political spectrum was propagating much more misinformation than the other?

Yes, considering that it's the entire thesis of the study and how they try to claim there's no ideological bias.

Do I really have to explain why this is ridiculous on HN? No censorship regime has ever said "we are censoring this because we're ideologically opposed to it". There are always other justifications, often paper thin but they exist. A common excuse is that anyone making the government look bad is "spreading rumours", for example (China uses this one a lot). In the west, it's that exactly the same except they use the word misinformation rather than rumours.

The study in question is nonsensical - like all other such studies - because it claims that people are getting banned for spreading "misinformation" and not being conservative, but doesn't have any rigorous definition of what misinformation is. Instead they asked a bunch of self-proclaimed "fact checkers" (i.e. the people tasked with enforcement of ideological orthodoxy), and as a backup measure picked QAnon and said, that's misinformation (all of it).

Is QAnon misinformation? Yes, it is. Nonetheless it's obviously not a complete definition of the problem. I'm not American but I recall very well that after Trump won that for years there was a massive, organized misinformation campaign claiming that Trump was a secret Russian agent. If they'd included that particular conspiracy theory into their definition they'd have found that there were lots of Democrats spreading misinformation too, but they didn't, because that would have defeated their goal (the production of ideological propaganda useful for political talking points like the one you just raised).

If you're going to try and claim your political opponents are generically less honest than you are in politics, that's one thing. But when people who claim to be scientists do it, and they use the exact same tactics, that just degrades science. It's not actual research of the sort that arises from some coherent theory of the world and which can be neutrally tested. It's simply "how can we prove that Republicans are evil today?".

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