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How someone's political affiliation affects what they believe

As I've talked about earlier, the spread of disinformation is a serious issue in the current pandemic for social media. We have seen a lot of social media sites try to tackle the problem by shutting down and filtering fake news, but today I wanted to talk about an NYU study that looks at how effective those filters are. The study paired headlines of stories with an alert that would identify it as either coming from a fact-checker, the public, news media, or AI and then recorded whether people's intentions to share reduced. The purpose is to see which type of identification would be most trusted and also see whether these alerts' effectiveness varied with the political affiliation or gender of the reader. The most significant effect that they found was the effect of political affiliation of the reader. The study recorded that fact checkers (real people) were trusted more than the news media, public, and AI which makes logical sense. The interesting finding though is that there is a large difference between the efficacy of all the markers between Democrats, Independents, and Republicans. Democrats were more likely to not share the headline if there was an alert, while Independents and Republicans were always more likely than Democrats to share the headline. Republicans in particular were vastly different. In fact, for the AI credibility alert, they ended up sharing the headline even more, resulting in a positive %-change.



Clearly, we can see that external associations play a huge part on how we use social media, but it is worrisome to think that our political affiliation can change it this much! I wonder how social media companies can target disinformation if the efficacy of their attempts vary this much. I recall that in Turkey, officials began  to inspect social media accounts and actually started detaining people (~400) due to sharing "false and provocative" posts concerning COVD-19.



- By: Usman Toor

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