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).
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.