I’m not sure why you have been downvoted. It may be true that the Republicans share information from sketchier sources, but the Hunter Biden laptop story suppression was so bad that I don’t think Democrats have a leg to stand on here. The message that it was “Russian disinformation” was completely evidence-free and baseless, and the fact that Twitter blocked the URL was a clear signal that the standards for different political views is different.
I think the conclusions of the paper probably stand, but a more rigorous analysis will need to address this.
Fact-checkers have occasionally made serious errors, and in other cases made arbitrary, premature, or flimsy judgments of ambiguous situations, essentially passing off opinion as fact. From what I've seen, these errors and arbitrary judgments tend to favor the liberal side. Scholars will need to remove these errors and arbitrary judgment calls from the "misinformation score" and see whether there continues to be a big partisan gap.
Again, my gut feeling is that the conclusions wouldn't be changed much. There's plenty of genuine right-wing misinformation out there that isn't tied to erroneous or opinion-based fact-checking. But a paper like this really needs to get down to brass tacks about what exactly is being called misinformation, or it will only be yet more ammunition for political and culture wars, and won't provide any scientific enlightenment.
I suspect that certain segments of the left would also be somewhat vindicated by a more serious and detailed review of what is deemed misinformation. Dissenters on all sides are at least sometimes unfairly treated by the mainstream fact-checking institutions.
You can’t “remove” those errors — they are likely the primary cause of the perceived gap. I think that fact checkers and related orgs are mostly correct, but where there is room for interpretation and when mistakes are made they happen with a strong bias in one direction. Removing those is basically just pruning “outliers” in dataset that don’t support the conclusion you’d like to make.
> You can’t “remove” those errors — they are likely the primary cause of the perceived gap.
I think you can fix the errors and exclude more opinion-based "fact checks" if you review the underlying data carefully and transparently. Whether those fixes and exclusions close the gap is currently a matter of opinion, and I think we should try to do better than just everyone just having their own opinions on it. That's my whole point.
If your tweet was censored or your account was banned on the basis of an opinion-based fact check, what difference does it make? The enforcement action was still taken.
It’s like saying that all police action in the United States is righteous and legitimate (you simply need to exclude all actions which are not). What is the value of such a tautological study/statement?
>I suspect that certain segments of the left would also be somewhat vindicated by a more serious and detailed review of what is deemed misinformation.
"Certain segments of the left" still believe that the Russians have a video of hookers peeing on Trump that they're using to puppeteer him to their own needs. The left has no business lecturing anyone about misinformation.
> Russians have a video of hookers peeing on Trump
That wasn't the actual claim, it was that the hookers were peeing on the bed in the hotel room with Trump.
(The actual interesting bit was that a video appearing to be that did turn up, and after examination, turned out to be a fake that someone put a considerable amount of effort into. I do wonder who, and what they were hoping to accomplish with it).
We should now have clear enough evidence to impeach Hunter Biden. Or at least we could fire him from his government position.
For what it is worth, the laptop is far from the smoking gun people seem to think it is. The data is a mess and the story of how the data was acquired still makes no sense. The only thing that has been verified so far is that some of the emails did pass through GMail.
I’m aware it’s a mess and the story is crazy, but unless we have hard evidence that something is legitimately misinformation, especially when it comes from a mostly reputable news source (NYP), then it should not be suppressed. And importantly: this standard should be held consistently, regardless of who benefits politically.
The “left a laptop at a repair shop” part is of course bizarre, but makes about as much sense to me as anything else that Hunter seems to have done in his life.
It's not entirely a joke. Lets say the Hunter Biden story is true and he profited off of a Ukranian oil company. Why would it be a scandal? He is not in a position of trust with the government. Joe Biden didn't appoint him to his staff. The huge "gotcha" moment where they take down the entire Hunter Biden empire of deceit and corruption doesn't affect the public interest.
I’m not sure what you mean by “suppose”. Hunter Biden publicly served on the board of Burisma with compensation upwards of ~50k per month from 2014-2019 (while his father was Vice President). Joe Biden was sufficiently involved in Ukraine that Obama officials actually expressed concerns about a conflict of interest.
He was also on the board of BHR during the same period and acquired a significant stake at a discount. AKAIK, these facts are not in dispute.
The part that is potential scandalous (and disputed) is that he was in these positions to peddle influence with his father and even kicking back compensation with his fathers explicit knowledge and approval.
Joe Biden is in a position of trust in government, and the defense against this has basically been “I have no idea what Hunter was doing and those were legitimate business arrangements”. However, if that’s untrue then it is obviously influence peddling and scandalous. I’m not really taking a position here, but it makes no sense to claim that simply because Hunter Biden is not in government, this is irrelevant.
