If there’s any single talking point conservative politicians have agreed upon in the last few years, it’s that social media is unfairly targeting them for their opinions. A deep study of political speech on Twitter (h/t TechDirt), carried out by researchers from MIT and Yale, considers that being conservative isn’t the problem; instead, it’s conservative love of sharing misinformation that leads to the impression of bias.
The researchers — Mohsen Mosleh, David Rand, Qi Yang, and Tauhid Zaman — found 9,000 “politically engaged” Twitter accounts, half Republican and half Democratic, and observed their behavior during the six months following the 2020 presidential election. And they did find that far more of the Republican accounts were banned than the Democratic ones. About 35 percent of the conservative accounts were banned in those six months, while only about 8 percent of the left-leaning accounts were banned.
