Republicans are flagged more often than Democrats for sharing misinformation on X’s Community Notes
Listed in
This article is not in any list yet, why not save it to one of your lists.Abstract
We use crowd-sourced assessments from X’s Community Notes program to examine whether there are partisan differences in the sharing of misleading information. Unlike previous studies, misleadingness here is determined by agreement across a diverse community of platform users, rather than by fact-checkers. We find that 131% more posts by Republicans are flagged as misleading compared to posts by Democrats. These results are not base rate artifacts, as we find no meaningful over-representation of Republicans among X users. Our findings provide strong evidence of a partisan asymmetry in misinformation sharing which cannot be attributed to political bias on the part of raters, and indicate that Republicans will be sanctioned more than Democrats even if platforms transition from professional fact-checking to Community Notes.