Turns out Community Notes are also "biased"
🤥 Faked Up #44: A preprint finds X's Community Notes disproportionately label Republican posts; Rome's chatbot resists my jailbreaks; and Barron Trudeau is trending.
Some personal news: I am now a professional futsal player.
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NEWS
Fake news made the U.S. stock market boom briefly on Monday. Fake job seekers are surging. Meta's fact-checking program in the US is officially kaput. Registrations are open for the 12th Global Fact-Checking Summit. The EU is offering 5 million euros to support a continental network of fact-checkers. X is floating the option to sell "dormant" handles to verified users. The X account for Czechia's prime minister posted false information after getting hacked. A key figure behind the Doppelgänger info op was arrested in Moscow on drug-related charges. Misinformation about the murder of 17-year-old Austin Metcalf spread widely. Autism disinformation reached millions on Telegram in Latin America. New UK rules require businesses to act against fake reviews. British PM Keir Starmer wants to use misinformation regulation as a bargaining chip with the US. Kenya is discussing national guidelines on disinformation. New Jersey passed a narrow law criminalizing deepfake porn; a more ambitious bill is flying through Congress (see FU#40).
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Oh no, Community Notes are also "biased"
Someone better not show Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk this working paper by Thomas Renault, Mohsen Mosleh, and David Rand. The billionaire owners of Meta and X based their support for community-driven correction labels on the alleged neutrality of the crowd compared to that of pesky professional fact-checkers.
Set aside that this support extends only as long as they agree with the findings of the community. And set aside, too, that a greater focus on right-leaning falsehoods may be a factor of their greater prevalence online.
It now turns out that Community Notes also disproportionately target Republicans.
Renault et al. extracted the 281,382 English-language notes written between January 2023 and June 2024. They then classified the users that these notes were correcting as Democratic or Republican based on the accounts they follow, resolving any uncertainty by getting an LLM to rate 500 of their tweets. (It's possible that this ended up including some users outside the U.S. who follow American politicians.)
The results are lopsided: 60% of proposed notes are on 'Republican' tweets; 40% on 'Democratic' ones. The difference gets starker when looking at notes that are rated helpful, 70% of which appear on Republican posts. This matters because only helpful notes are appended to the offending tweet and shown to all X users.
So not only do Republican tweets get targeted more by notes; those notes are also far more likely to be be considered helpful (10.4% vs 6.8% for those proposed on Democratic tweets). Overall, the researchers claim there's a +64% chance of a note on a Republican user's tweet being deemed helpful when holding stable a user's verified status, follower count, tweeting volume and the topic of the tweet.
Given Community Notes' bridging algorithm, this research is strongly suggestive that right-leaning American social media users post more content that third parties find misleading. Other recent research has found that extremely conservative users are more susceptible to misinformation and less likely to recognize it.
There were a couple of other valuable tidbits in this preprint. For one, a plurality of Community Notes focus on politics (35.1%), significantly ahead of science and health (12.7% and 7.8% respectively) and economics (5.3%).
Additionally, at least until June 2024, there were more Democratic posts on X than Republican ones, even though the share of the latter greatly increased following Musk's takeover of the platform. This evolving user base and the updates to the Community Notes bridging algorithms means a follow-up analysis will be invaluable (Renault told me he and his co-authors are working on it).
