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Partisan conflict over content moderation is more than disagreement about facts

Social media companies have come under increasing pressure to remove misinformation from their platforms, but partisan disagreements over what should be removed have stymied efforts to deal with misinformation in the United States. Current explanations for these disagreements center on the “fact gap...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Appel, Ruth E., Pan, Jennifer, Roberts, Margaret E.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: American Association for the Advancement of Science 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10624338/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37922349
http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adg6799
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author Appel, Ruth E.
Pan, Jennifer
Roberts, Margaret E.
author_facet Appel, Ruth E.
Pan, Jennifer
Roberts, Margaret E.
author_sort Appel, Ruth E.
collection PubMed
description Social media companies have come under increasing pressure to remove misinformation from their platforms, but partisan disagreements over what should be removed have stymied efforts to deal with misinformation in the United States. Current explanations for these disagreements center on the “fact gap”—differences in perceptions about what is misinformation. We argue that partisan differences could also be due to “party promotion”—a desire to leave misinformation online that promotes one’s own party—or a “preference gap”—differences in internalized preferences about whether misinformation should be removed. Through an experiment where respondents are shown false headlines aligned with their own or the opposing party, we find some evidence of party promotion among Democrats and strong evidence of a preference gap between Democrats and Republicans. Even when Republicans agree that content is false, they are half as likely as Democrats to say that the content should be removed and more than twice as likely to consider removal as censorship.
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spelling pubmed-106243382023-11-04 Partisan conflict over content moderation is more than disagreement about facts Appel, Ruth E. Pan, Jennifer Roberts, Margaret E. Sci Adv Social and Interdisciplinary Sciences Social media companies have come under increasing pressure to remove misinformation from their platforms, but partisan disagreements over what should be removed have stymied efforts to deal with misinformation in the United States. Current explanations for these disagreements center on the “fact gap”—differences in perceptions about what is misinformation. We argue that partisan differences could also be due to “party promotion”—a desire to leave misinformation online that promotes one’s own party—or a “preference gap”—differences in internalized preferences about whether misinformation should be removed. Through an experiment where respondents are shown false headlines aligned with their own or the opposing party, we find some evidence of party promotion among Democrats and strong evidence of a preference gap between Democrats and Republicans. Even when Republicans agree that content is false, they are half as likely as Democrats to say that the content should be removed and more than twice as likely to consider removal as censorship. American Association for the Advancement of Science 2023-11-03 /pmc/articles/PMC10624338/ /pubmed/37922349 http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adg6799 Text en Copyright © 2023 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (CC BY). https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Social and Interdisciplinary Sciences
Appel, Ruth E.
Pan, Jennifer
Roberts, Margaret E.
Partisan conflict over content moderation is more than disagreement about facts
title Partisan conflict over content moderation is more than disagreement about facts
title_full Partisan conflict over content moderation is more than disagreement about facts
title_fullStr Partisan conflict over content moderation is more than disagreement about facts
title_full_unstemmed Partisan conflict over content moderation is more than disagreement about facts
title_short Partisan conflict over content moderation is more than disagreement about facts
title_sort partisan conflict over content moderation is more than disagreement about facts
topic Social and Interdisciplinary Sciences
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10624338/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37922349
http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adg6799
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