Twitter is actually doing a (relatively) good job limiting right-wing misinformation, study finds

[marmar]

(Salon) Whenever a far right personality is banned from social media — or even considered as a possible target for such a ban — conservatives frequently respond that being deplatformed only makes them stronger.

In some cases, as with Trump, the results of this deplatforming can be mixed. A recent New York Times study found that Trump's dual bans from both Facebook and Twitter have reduced the spread of his Big Lie on both platforms. At the same time, his allies have still managed to keep his larger political brand alive on those sites by spreading his messages to their millions of followers.

When it comes to other right-wing misinformation peddlers, a new study in the journal Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction found that deplatforming can be quite effective in curtailing both malicious actors and their narratives. The researchers learned this after studying the Twitter fortunes of three influential far right personalities — Owen Benjamin, Alex Jones and Milo Yiannopoulos — after they were kicked off the site.

"Analyzing the bans of 3 extremist influencers with thousands of followers, we found that banning disrupted the discussions about influencers: posts referencing each influencer declined significantly," Shagun Jhaver, the study's lead author and an assistant professor in the Department of Library and Information Science at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, told Salon by email. "More importantly, our study showed that deplatforming helped reduce the spread of many anti-social ideas and conspiracy theories popularized by influencers. Further, we found that banning significantly reduced the overall posting activity and toxicity levels of thousands of supporters for each influencer." ...........(more)

https://www.salon.com/2021/10/27/twitter-is-actually-doing-a-relatively-good-job-limiting-right-wing-misinformation-study-finds/

[leighbythesea2]

1. Its

The only platform I look at, after here. Its got it's own things, like lots of trolls. Took too long on trump for sure.

The info out now on fb is reprehensible tho, and you knew after cambridge analytics story came out in 2016 fb was a tool. Never even tried. Now we know some employees tried, but Z doesn't care.