Study: Conservative users' misinformation sharing drives higher suspension rates, not platform bias

A new paper, "Differences in misinformation sharing can lead to politically asymmetric sanctions," published today in Nature suggests that the higher quantity of social media policy enforcement (such as account suspensions) for conservative users could be explained by the higher quantity of misinformation shared by those conservative users—and so does not constitute evidence of inherent biases in the policies from social media companies or in the definition of what constitutes misinformation.

Written by researchers from MIT Sloan School of Management, the University of Oxford, Cornell University, and Yale University, co-authors of the paper include Mohsen Mosleh, Qi Yang, Tauhid Zaman, Gordon Pennycook and David G. Rand.