This is one of a recent run of hilarious attempts to claim that anti-conservative bias on social networks (or alternatively, enforcement of left wing orthodoxy), doesn't really exist at all. This one is especially entertaining for the pretzel-like contortions the authors go through.
> it’s become a key part of “the narrative” that social media websites have an “anti-conservative bias” in how they moderate. As we’ve pointed out over and over again there remains little evidence to support this.
From the study they're linking to:
> We then investigated potential political bias in suspension patterns and identified a set of 9,000 politically engaged Twitter users, half Democratic and half Republican, in October 2020, and followed them through the six months after the U.S. 2020 election. During that period, while only 7.7% of the Democratic users were suspended, 35.6% of the Republican users were suspended
It literally shows Republicans getting suspended at drastically higher rates than Democrats but, according to TechDirt, there is no evidence of any anti-conservative bias anywhere. It's just a fantasy. Because, see, social media platforms aren't biased against conservatives, just people who are 'wrong' about politics, which is totally different! The study is exactly the kind of ideologically biased pseudo-science that makes the social sciences such a laughing stock. It's just a giant exercise in circular reasoning. Because social networks don't literally say they're banning people for ideological reasons, nobody is banned for ideological reasons. That's the study, in a nutshell.
> it’s become a key part of “the narrative” that social media websites have an “anti-conservative bias” in how they moderate. As we’ve pointed out over and over again there remains little evidence to support this.
From the study they're linking to:
> We then investigated potential political bias in suspension patterns and identified a set of 9,000 politically engaged Twitter users, half Democratic and half Republican, in October 2020, and followed them through the six months after the U.S. 2020 election. During that period, while only 7.7% of the Democratic users were suspended, 35.6% of the Republican users were suspended
It literally shows Republicans getting suspended at drastically higher rates than Democrats but, according to TechDirt, there is no evidence of any anti-conservative bias anywhere. It's just a fantasy. Because, see, social media platforms aren't biased against conservatives, just people who are 'wrong' about politics, which is totally different! The study is exactly the kind of ideologically biased pseudo-science that makes the social sciences such a laughing stock. It's just a giant exercise in circular reasoning. Because social networks don't literally say they're banning people for ideological reasons, nobody is banned for ideological reasons. That's the study, in a nutshell.