Study finds flagged Trump Tweets still spread despite false warnings of misinformation KIRO 7 News Seattle

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The spread of misinformation on social media has been front and center during the pandemic and since the 2020 elections with concerns on both sides of the aisle.

Now a new peer-reviewed study has found that even if a post is flagged on one platform, it can still spread far to other platforms.

Researchers at New York Universities’s Center for Social Media and Politics took a particular look at Twitter and how it handled former President Donald Trumps tweets about what it flagged as election misinformation.

We are interested in understanding the impact of a single platform, in this case Twitter, said Zeve Sanderson, Executive Director of NYUs Center for Social Media and Politics. We live in a networked information age and what this means is that information can spread so quickly.

Twitter has flagged hundreds of former President Trumps who have tweeted about the 2020 election, either attaching a label warning or completely blocking it.

The study found that tweets with warning labels actually spread longer and longer within Twitter than tweets that were actually flagged.

It also found that while blocked tweets were effective to stop the spread of messages within Twitter, those posts ended up spreading more across other social media platforms.

Information posted on one platform can pop up on other platforms in the form of links, screenshots or direct quote messages, Sanderson said.

What is not clear is why is behind these trends and Sanderson said that is due to the limited data available to the public but research into the causes is ongoing.

However, what the study says is that if the strategies to stop the spread of misinformation are different on each site, the messages will often still spread.

As we think about what intervention strategies can make these information environments healthier, or kind of discourse stronger, we really want to make sure that we keep this network in mind as dynamic and non-dynamic. only focused on individual platforms, Sanderson said.

In response to the study, a spokesperson for Twitter pointed to actions implemented to stop the spread of election misinformation including labeling around 300,000 tweets as misleading in October and November last year.

The challenges of misinformation continue to be complex, and require a society -wide approach, a Twitter spokesperson said. We are constantly researching, questioning, and evolving features that may stimulate or encourage Twitter behaviors that negatively affect the health of online conversation or may lead to offline harm.

Republicans on Capitol Hill have accused social media companies of targeting conservatives on their platforms by censoring at multiple hearings in Congress on how companies handle misinformation.

2021 Cox Media Group

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