Tech Policy Press asked Stephan the following:
- Do social media companies disproportionately moderate posts from one side of the political spectrum? If so, is this the result of bias or something else?
- Second, does social science show that one side of the political spectrum is unfairly penalized or rewarded by platform recommendation algorithms? If so, which side and why?
Stephan responded:
"There are three misconceptions or misdirections that are common in this space. My papers address all of them, and I point to a further publication below that addresses the third one.
First, there is the conflation of fact-checking with allegations of censorship. Fact-checking is not censorship. It is counterspeech. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously formalized the counterspeech doctrine when he said that the best remedy to combat harmful speech is “more speech, not enforced silence.” Anyone who claims fact-checking is censorship is therefore, wittingly or unwittingly, acting in a manner that is injurious to free speech. When Facebook discontinued fact-checking, it gave liars a free pass while preventing counterspeech to hold them accountable—quite the antithesis to free democratic discourse.
Second, there are claims that social media are biased against political conservatives. The opposite is true. For example, an analysis of Facebook engagements during the 2016 election campaign revealed that conservative outlets (Fox News, Breitbart, and Daily Caller) amassed 839 million interactions, dwarfing more centrist outlets (CNN with 191 million and ABC News with 138 million), and totaling more than the remaining seven mainstream pages in the top ten. Another analysis of Twitter found that conservatives enjoy greater algorithmic amplification than people on the political left, and this algorithmic bias has become even more extreme since Musk took over.
Third, there is the related claim that fact-checking is biased against conservatives because more right-wing content is flagged as false. Several lines of evidence show this claim to be false. It has been shown repeatedly that professional fact checkers’ judgments or ratings of the credibility of news sites correlate highly with those of bipartisan crowds (i.e., randomly sampled members of the public). When you combine that result with the well-established finding that most misinformation online is spread and consumed by people on the political right, then it naturally follows that even fair and unbiased fact-checking must call out conservatives more than liberals – that’s not a problem with fact-checking but with the lopsided reliance on misinformation by the right. This was shown recently by Mosleh et al. in this paper."