That's all factually true but if enough people object to that framing and demand a Community Note and then the Community Note is clarified by people like them, I would be a data point showing that Clinton supporters are far more likely to engage in disinformation than Obama ones.
My statements are completely verifiable and yet could easily be manipulated into being labeled a falsehood on social media.
It is happening every day, but a new paper says that Democrats are probably better at it. The authors would object to that, they want to suggest Republicans are either lying or stupid more but as someone who's watched Democrats butcher vaccines, food, and energy, not to mention chemistry and biology, for nearly 20 years, I know better and so does everyone else without a hard political skew. Both sides have a lot of a stupid people, both sides have malevolent cranks, but this work really only shows that one side gets called out less.
Are Republicans lying/stupid more often or are their comments flagged more often by Democrats as political gamesmanship? The paper claims to have the answer but their actual methodology doesn't show it.
Though Obama rode a social media wave, Donald Trump was the first candidate to be a true social media force, in 2016. Republicans were again outspent by their wealthier opponents but he won over Secretary Clinton handily, even as Democrats alleged their victory was stolen. He lost in 2020 and Republicans claimed the win was stolen just as Democrats had in 2016 (and 2000) but his mobilization strategy worked again in 2024. Now, it seems Democrats are back in the social media lead. Even on Twitter, which they claim has become too right-wing, Democrats mobilize and demand twice as many Community Notes as Republicans do.
If you think that simply means Republicans are engaged in lies and misinformation twice as often, well, that just tells us how you vote. To skeptics and moderates, it only means they are caught twice as often.
The group of internet analysts looked at Tweets demanding Community Notes. Republicans unsurprisingly flagged economic claims by Democrats, like the Biden economy was good, firing probationary government employees hired to inflate job numbers would ruin the country, etc. a lot less than Democrats did about claims that tariffs were a good idea. This was played out in many areas but some of their selections are just weird. Who cares if more Republicans believe that a new Grand Theft Auto game is coming out next week or a photo of a rainstorm is from India rather than New York City? What is that telling us about the actual misinformation or disinformation the authors claim they have found? People like to have "scoops" and journalists are wrong on those all of the time. Sports psychic Mel Kiper insisted University of Colorado Boulder quarterback Shedeur Sanders was going in the top three picks in the NFL draft but he went 144th. If you wanted to create a correlation among people who posted it, or about Kiper promoting disinformation, you can but it isn't valid any more than a snapshot of tweets about Republicans and Democrats is.
Because many of the claims that got Community Notes summoned against Republicans recently were overwhelmingly made by Democrats even a year ago.
That's the problem with correlation. It can link anything to anything. Correlation is why some people were gullible enough to eat bland egg whites and go on low-fat diets. If correlation was science we would have 10,000 cures for cancer on supermarket shelves and average life expectancy would be 101 years of age.
Is Organic™ food linked to more autism? It sure is. Just like horse dewormer is linked by epidemiologists to COVID-19 cures. Over 400 years ago, illiterate peasants knew that correlation is not causation but now 71% of people worldwide think any molecule of any chemical is the same as 10,000 doses of that chemical. There is no innate political divide in that but if you give me a grant, I can find one. People want to believe in endocrine disruption and acupuncture and the Mediterranean Diet because it gives them something to do to improve their health, not because there is science to any of it.
Nonetheless, Professor Mohsen Mosleh, Associate Professor of Social Data Science at the Oxford Internet Institute cheered,“Our findings provide strong evidence of a partisan asymmetry in misinformation sharing which cannot be attributed to political bias on the part of fact-checkers or academic researchers.”
Except it can absolutely be attributed to political bias, including in the authors of the paper. Vox populi is only valid if the people with voices are diverse. A community of astrologers peer-reviewing papers about astrology for an astrology journal are going to find astrology works. The authors acknowledge that but then go ahead and claim a bridging algorithm they have never seen accounts for it.
The health claims being made by Republicans today, primarily about vaccines, were first made by Democrats. For decades. We used to joke that if you drew a circle around a Whole Foods, you were going to find wealthy Democrats who also believed vaccines cause autism. Before we helped get a law passed in California banning arbitrary exemptions, the coast of the state alone, over 80% Democrats, had more unvaccinated kids in schools than every other state combined.
The claims about food coloring and vaccines and chemicals were made by current HHS Secretary Kennedy for decades as a Natural Resources Defense Lawyer and proud Democrat. They called his positions mainstream. So important to the Democratic party that President-Elect Obama agreed with him that vaccines might cause autism and floated Kennedy's name to run EPA, before being told he wouldn't get the votes in the Senate.
A snapshot of Tweets about health today by Republicans is the same as Democrats of 2020 and for 13 years prior to that. A neutral fact-finding effort would reveal that because instead of taking just 15 months now they would compare them against the same claims made 15 years ago. Their finding that Democrats got Community Notes rated as helpful 50% more than Republicans isn't a validation of their flaws in their method, it is a red flag about their method. Which even led another author to declare Republicans will be driven off the site if Community Notes replaces corporate third-party Fact Checkers, as most social media sites are doing because Republicans claimed secret sauce Fact Checking was biased against them.
If you really think Republicans on social media are twice as stupid or deceptive as Democrats, oh to have your glorious, naïve soul. It is instead just another battle in the Forever War of Politics. This time being waged in the US by academics in France and England.
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