The Social Media Fact-Check Farce A study says Twitter’s anti-Trump ‘corrections’ make some people more likely to believe Trump.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-social-media-fact-check-farce-11606519380?mod
In recent years liberals have successfully lobbied social-media companies to police conservative content more and more aggressively. But there’s little evidence that this political interference has reduced the prevalence of misinformation online—and a new study shows how it could make the problem worse.
In the study—by Dino Christenson of Boston University and Sarah Kreps and Douglas Kriner of Cornell—volunteers were shown a May 26 tweet by President Trump attacking mail-in voting and claiming that “Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed.”
Groups of participants were also shown “corrections” to Mr. Trump’s tweet, including Twitter’s “explanatory text labeling the claims ‘unsubstantiated’ according to major media outlets, including CNN and the Washington Post.”
Conservatives did not find mainstream-media assurances convincing. For Republicans who were shown Twitter’s effort to debunk the President, “belief that mail voter fraud occurs was more than 13% higher than in the control.” Or as the authors put it, “corrections increased misperceptions among those predisposed to believe President Trump.”
Great job, Twitter: In your Resistance zeal, you may have increased the salience of the mail-fraud idea among Mr. Trump’s core supporters. The overall effect was a wash, the authors find, because Democrats were more likely to believe the corrections. But when it comes to Republicans, the site may have played into Mr. Trump’s hands.
It’s not a mystery why this might be. Twitter and the mainstream press—to put it gently—have done little to demonstrate to Mr. Trump’s supporters that they are honest reporters of fact and judges of news. And this was before Twitter’s outrageous October blackout against New York Post reporting critical of Joe Biden’s family.
Twitter is now dotted with corrections to tweets alleging voter fraud. Mr. Trump’s post-election claims of massive fraud are dubious and undermine confidence in elections. But they are slowly collapsing from their own lack of evidence, not because of social-media corrections.
The marketplace of ideas is a better engine for sorting truth from falsehood than self-declared gatekeepers who have earned no social authority. Big Tech companies would serve themselves and the country better by not wading deeper into this political thicket.
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