Wolfson Fellow Co-authors Study on Political Bias in Twitter’s Community Notes

A recent study co-authored by Professor Mohsen Mosleh, Governing Body Fellow at Wolfson College and Associate Professor of Social Data Science at the Oxford Internet Institute, has found that posts made by Republican users on X (formerly Twitter) are more than twice as likely to be flagged for misinformation than those by Democrats.

Conducted in collaboration with researchers at Panthéon-Sorbonne and the MIT Sloan School of Management, the study analysed Community Notes, X’s crowd-sourced fact-checking system, and found that two thirds of the posts flagged as potentially misleading were written by Republican users, while only one third came from Democrats.

The researchers also examined the outcomes of the fact-checking process. They found that less than one in ten (7%) of Community Notes proposed on Democratic tweets were rated ‘helpful’ by a diverse group of users, compared to 10% for notes on Republican tweets.

“Our findings provide strong evidence of a partisan asymmetry in misinformation sharing which cannot be attributed to political bias on the part of fact-checkers or academic researchers,” said Professor Mosleh.

He added, “Even on Elon Musk’s X, the user-based Community Notes program flags posts by Republicans as misleading much more often than posts by Democrats. This undercuts the logic offered by Musk and Mark Zuckerberg for eliminating fact-checkers on X and Meta, respectively, namely that fact-checkers are biased against Republicans.”

Read the full paper ‘ Republicans are flagged more often than Democrats for sharing misinformation on X’s Community Notes’, Thomas Renault, Mohsen Mosleh and David G. Rand