Research
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Journal Article
Twitter Flagged Donald Trump’s Tweets with Election Misinformation: They Continued to Spread Both On and Off the Platform
Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Misinformation Review, 2021
We analyze the spread of Donald Trump’s tweets that were flagged by Twitter using two intervention strategies—attaching a warning label and blocking engagement with the tweet entirely. We find that while blocking engagement on certain tweets limited their diffusion, messages we examined with warning labels spread further on Twitter than those without labels. Additionally, the messages that had been blocked on Twitter remained popular on Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit, being posted more often and garnering more visibility than messages that had either been labeled by Twitter or received no intervention at all. Taken together, our results emphasize the importance of considering content moderation at the ecosystem level.
News & Views
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Commentary
The Social Media Data We Need to Answer Key Research Questions
Ahead of a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee hearing on platform transparency, we submitted a letter outlining the type of research questions we want to answer — and the social media data we need to answer them.
May 4, 2022
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News
Despite Warning Labels, Trump’s Election Misinformation Tweets Spread Widely Across Social Media Platforms, New Study Finds
The paper’s findings reveal how misinformation spreads across networks and point to need to improve content-moderation techniques.
August 24, 2021
