After convicted felon and twice-impeached former president Donald Trump and 70,000 other accounts were removed from Twitter following the Jan. 6 riots, the spread of misinformation on the platform plummeted.
It’s probably reasonable, but the finding is supported by a peer-reviewed paper published in the scientific journal Nature this week.
The study led by David Lazer, professor of political science and computer and information science at Northeastern University in the US, shows that the sudden decision to deplatform 70,000 disinformation traffickers in response to the violence in the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 “reduced circulation. of disinformation from deplatformed users as well as from those who followed deplatformed users.”
With social media increasingly consuming people’s attention at the expense of conventional media such as newspapers, radio and television, its influence on political discourse is under the spotlight.
Lazer and team looked at a panel of 599,686 US-based Twitter users — now known as X — who posted at least one URL during the 2020 election and found that about 1,361 (or 0.25 percent) of them deplatformed between 8 and January 12. However, this small percentage of users was found to be responsible for 4.35 percent of the content on Twitter and 24.13 percent of all misinformation shared on the panel. Meanwhile, 26.4 percent of users on the panel followed one of the removed accounts.
After the accounts were removed from Twitter, the researchers found an average daily reduction of 103 tweets linked to disinformation URLs when analyzing posts between June 2020 and January 2021. Users who followed banned accounts were likely to share less disinformation with other users. others after the misinformation accounts were removed, the study found.
The researchers noted that social media platforms publish content moderation guidelines limiting the publication of misinformation.
“However, content suppression results in difficult business decisions for technology companies. It is well established that social media users post a significant volume of misinformation and that political content is more attractive and extreme content perhaps especially so. Because of these engagement models, curation policies that optimize engagement metrics can promote content that promotes polarization, division, and extremism, and tech companies often find themselves under intense political pressure to limit the extent to which their platforms mine democracy and public interest,” the newspaper said.
The researchers were clear that the paper does not prove that deplatforming accounts had a causal impact on disinformation. “There is no way we can fully disentangle the effect of insurgency and other real-world political events from the implementation of Twitter,” the study added.
However, he also says that many “super-spreaders of disinformation” and traffickers of content from QAnon – a far-right conspiracy theory group born on the 4chan forums whose beliefs include Pizzagate, deep state geopolitical conspiracy claims and more – chose to leave Twitter after it tightened enforcement. This trend may also be due to a decrease in harmful content, the study said.
“Twitter (now X) is now owned by X Corp and ultimately by Elon Musk, under whose ownership content moderation has been greatly reduced. Regardless of the future of X as a platform, we can be sure that social media platforms will continue to have a key role in the civic discourse”, said the researchers. ®
Bootnote
Yes, the Trumpster actually said that about Clinton.
