Thread by @WillRinehart

Late last month @InsideSourcesDC ran an op-ed from @CGOusu on our misinformation research: insidesources.com/social-media-a…. There's a lot to the paper, so I thought a thread would be helpful.

The most surprising results? Misinformation isn't good for tech's bottom line.

At a hearing on disinformation earlier this year, @FrankPallone slammed tech CEOs and their role in pushing misinformation saying, "You’re not passive bystanders. When you spread misinformation, actively promoting and amplifying it, you do it because you make more money."

@finkd hardly allayed fears, “While it may be true that people might be more likely to click on it in the short-term, it’s not good for our business or our product or our community for this content to be there.”

Some research suggests that misinformation boosts short-term engagement with platforms. So, one would expect that platforms are benefiting from the spread of misinformation. socialmediatoday.com/news/new-study…

But it is tough to compare platforms with and without misinformation in the wild. Moreover, users learn and change their preferences over time.

With these concerns in mind, our economic lab set up an experimental game to test some key questions.

The game culminates with a real cash payout, so participants had skin in the game and they were randomly assigned to one of three conditions.
1. No access to a platform.
2. Only accurate information could be shared on a platform.
3. Misinformation could be posted.

The results undercut the notion that misinformation is good for the bottom line. User engagement on social media is significantly lower when misinformation is permitted. All of the metrics that matter took a dive in the presence of misinformation, dubbed the "full" condition.

Much as @finkd had suggested, social media platforms focused on user long-term engagement have a clear incentive to purge their platforms of misinformation. There might be a short term bump in engagement, but in the long run, it negatively affects engagement.

But the results aren’t entirely surprising. Back in 2015, researchers at Google quietly announced that the company had reduced by half the number of mobile ads users saw, driven by a focus on long-term user experience: static.googleusercontent.com/media/research…

The world we all inhabit, the world outside the lab, lies somewhere in the gray zone between the two states of misinformation and truth. On the whole, however, social media platforms have incentives to eliminate misinformation.

The full writeup can be found here: thecgo.org/research/socia…

And the op-ed can be found here: insidesources.com/social-media-a…

Some people that might be interested: @ezraklein @mattyglesias @ericgoldman @mmasnick @jess_miers @alisternburg @MattGrossmann @BrendanNyhan @daphnehk @rcalo @daniellecitron @hartzog @jonathanmayer @AriSchulman