Given some outraged reactions to Meta‘s choice of replacing fact-checking with Community Notes, it‘s important to gain a realistic understanding of the efficacy of fact-checking.
tl;dr: I'm not sure switching to Community Notes will have much of an impact on public discourse 🧵1/ First, here are four meta-analyses on the effects of fact-checking. I‘m happy for others to correct me, but my reading of the evidence is that the effects of fact-checking are very small, often fleeting, if they exist at all.
(1) tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…
(2) tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…
(3) nature.com/articles/s4156…
(4) journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117… 2/

In the analysis of Trump's reelection, misinformation does not (yet?) appear to play a major role. Have we reached "peak misinfo"? Is this election an inflection point in public discourse about "fake news"? Some thoughts 🧵 1/7 We know that the 2016 election was a major factor in fueling interest in the fake news issue. Fake news were suggested to have contributed significantly to Trump's surprise victory. So what's different about 2024?
files.osf.io/v1/resources/4…
Also: firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/… 2/7

This type of reporting is so irresponsible and a big part of the problem. A political group hires some consultancy to run the type of analysis that has been refuted again and again - just to claim strong disinformation effects without any evidence. 1/
theguardian.com/world/article/… This analysis, which is hardly documented and (of course) not peer-reviewed, basically categorizes a bunch of accounts that follow each other as troll accounts. They may well be. But that tells us absolutely nothing about the reach, let alone impact of these accounts. 2/

It seems to me that the discourse on social media harms suffers from a kind of negativity-seeking concept creep. We usually start out with very strong, panicky claims about harms caused by social media. Initial studies often appear to support these claims. 1/ However, the more research we get, the more conflicting results we see, ultimately largely disproving the original claims. Instead of recognizing this as progress, the discourse then tends to shift the goal post by redefining key concepts. 2/

A fascinating documentation of how the views of opinion leaders are shaped 👇🏼 A lot of think tank papers, some activist statements, several magazine commentaries. Most of a distinctly alarmist bent. Looks like quite little that directly relates to actual research.

https://twitter.com/barackobama/status/1516809487222460427

Interestingly, there are quite a few reports out there, with strong academic contributions, that attempt to aggregate the state of research (which is really hard). Just for example, I thought this @royalsociety report did a great job 👇 1/3

https://twitter.com/TimsRJ/status/1483713468851277824?s=20&t=HVBxB4aaVTyrDBdBJkV2Ag

With all due respect to @JonHaidt, I increasingly suspect that pieces like this really aren’t about how social media corrupt society, but rather a projection of increasing confusion and frustration within the elite onto society. Short 🧵 1/7 theatlantic.com/magazine/archi… First, romanticism about the “early” Internet or social media in the early 00s overlooks how elitist the early Internet was. Large parts of the population simply weren’t online. There was a notable class divide in Internet access. 2/7 pewresearch.org/internet/2015/…

Jene, die sich über Twitters Fact-checking freuen und Facebooks liberalere Haltung kritisieren, unterschätzen m.E. die Komplexität der Situation. Im Kampf gegen „Fake News“ grassiert zunehmend ein ebenso naiver wie expansiver Wahrheitsbegriff. 1/5

https://twitter.com/onlinemedialaw/status/1265942098886393859

Konflikte, v.a. politische, entstehen in der Regel nicht aufgrund mangelnder Fakten, sondern rund um die Interpretation dieser Fakten. Es geht meist um Meinungen, Wertungen, Weltanschauungen, nicht Fakten. „Fake News“ sind darum enorm schwierig zu definieren und abzugrenzen. 2/5