It’s easy for biased users to bury accurate Community Notes, report says.
This article is about one study, by CCDH, who did not publish much of anything about their methodology. CCDH’s CEO was an anti-Corbynite that fed into the false accusations of antisemitism against the left for having solidarity with Palestinians and CCDH continues to prominently focus on antisemitism and trying to blur the line between antisemitism and antizionism. The faction that he supported is currently in power in Labour and are supporters of Israel during this genocide.
I would not trust them to make good calls on what is an accurate community note vs. not. Community notes are all over the place but on average depict a bazinga liberal position, which is not actually the most accurate one. Having looked at their “study” paper, their first and most promindnt criterion for accuracy was whether community note aligned with fact-checking websites. Fact-checking websites are, to put it bluntly, bullshit, and really just reflect the author’s opinion.
For example, one of the things they claim is election misinformation is the claim that voting systems are unreliable. They are saying this is an inaccurate or misleading claim. In the US, it is accurate to say that it’s voting systems are unreliable. They are frequently run using voting machines from private companies, black boxes with no real way to verify their results that are actually implemented in most places, and polling stations often only gave 1 or 2, so when they break people are disenfranchised. Every computer security expert audit says you should not trust these systems and should use paper ballots with manual observable recounts. The allegation of misinformation is really about what is perceived to be voter suppression, of people feeling like they shouldn’t vote because it won’t count anyways. This is not actually misinformation, though: the voting machines are unreliable, that is the actual problem in this situation, not the use of repeating a fact in your favor.
It is salient that at no point do they highlight the naked propaganda for Zionism that has been rampant on social media, including about elections. This was presumably filtered out early on by their selection of what counts as a topic of interest for their analysis.
Finally, the clear purpose of CCDH is to lobby for having more oversight on social media, including large, centralized moderation teams that have historically been cozy with liberal governments.
nick@midwest.social 4 days ago
You kens Russian and Chinese operatives, right? Not toxic users.
HumongousChungus@hexbear.net 4 days ago
Americans are not at fault for our reactionary positions and viewpoints. It’s because of Foreigners, especially those from the mysterious orient. They brought the scourge of racism to our door even after we fixed racism for all time in 2008
GarbageShoot@hexbear.net 4 days ago
This is just normal Republican lies. There’s no particular reason to attribute it to foreign influence. In fact:
It seems like some of it is nearly-openly lead by the platform owner, with judgements on veracity handed down from him to his fanboys.
The calls are coming from inside the house. You can’t pin everything on foreigners, least of all things where you have no specific information on them being to blame.
“But bots!”
Even setting aside that the article doesn’t attribute even most of what’s happening to bots (hence its title), that’s not an adequate counterclaim. Do you really, really think that among the mountain of Republican think tanks and other organizations, none of them are running a bot farm of even a few dozen accounts, like the 45 cited in the article? Granted, it could be Russia (logically, it probably isn’t China, which Republicans are usually harder on), but there have also been domestic operations, haven’t there?
Here’s an easy example that does not directly “prove” the above case is not foreign interference (again, it’s at an overlap point of the interest of different groups) but demonstrates that it clearly seems that there are domestic bot nets doing numbers and thus that such a possibility needs to be considered for other cases where a Republican bot net might have an interest.