Mass Twitter bans after January 6 riots reduced misinformation

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2024-06-06 01:00

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Misinformation on Twitter (now called X) decreased after former US President Donald Trump and 70,000 misinformation traffickers were deplatformed following the violence at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, according to international researchers. The team analysed a panel of almost 600,000 US-based Twitter users and found 1,361 (0.25%) of these users were kicked off Twitter in the days following the insurrection. This subset was responsible for 4.35% of misinformation on Twitter overall, and almost a quarter of all misinformation shared amongst the panel. After the accounts were cancelled, the team found an average daily reduction of 103 tweets when analysing misinformation URLs posted between June 2020 and January 2021, and found users who followed these accounts tended to retweet less misinformation. The findings suggest social media platforms have the capacity to reduce the spread of misinformation, according to the team.

Media release

From: Springer Nature

Social media: The effect of deplatforming on the spread of misinformation

The circulation of misinformation on Twitter (now called X) decreased after former US president Donald Trump and 70,000 misinformation traffickers were deplatformed following the violence at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, according to a paper published in Nature. The findings suggest that social media platforms may have the capacity to partially control the spread of misinformation.

Social media platforms in the twenty-first century have a key role in communication, but these platforms can be an easy mechanism to post and spread misinformation as well. In the days following the violence at the US Capitol on January 6, Twitter decided to ban 70,000 accounts as well as former president Donald Trump as the platform deemed these to be spreading misinformation.

David Lazer and colleagues analysed a panel of 599,686 US-based Twitter users who posted at least one URL during the country’s 2020 election cycle and found that 1,361 (about 0.25%) of those users were deplatformed between January 8 and 12. This subset of users was responsible for 4.35% of content on Twitter and 24.13% of all the misinformation shared amongst the panel. Of the users in the panel who were not deplatformed, 26.4% followed one of the removed accounts.

After the deplatforming of a portion of the panel, there was an average daily reduction of 103 tweets when analyzing misinformation URLs posted between June 2020 and January 2021. Lazer and colleagues also note that users who followed the deplatformed accounts tended to share less misinformation through retweets following the mass deplatforming and suggest that a reduction in misinformation on the platform may be a result of accounts leaving Twitter.

This research demonstrates how social media platforms have the potential to reduce the spread of misinformation. However, the authors note that these data come from a single country and time, so it is unclear if they are generalizable to other events.

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Journal/
conference: Nature

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: Northeastern University, USA

Funder: D.M.J.L. acknowledges support from the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Volkswagen Foundation. S.D.M. was supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation through a grant to the Institute for Data, Democracy & Politics at the George Washington University.

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