Republicans are flagged more often than Democrats for sharing misinformation on X’s Community Notes
We use crowd-sourced assessments from X's Community Notes program to examine whether there are partisan differences in the sharing of misleading information. Unlike previous studies, misleadingness here is determined by agreement across a diverse community of platform users, rather than by fact-checkers. We find that 2.3 times more posts by Republicans are flagged as misleading compared to posts by Democrats. These results are not base rate artifacts, as we find no meaningful overrepresentation of Republicans among X users. Our findings provide strong evidence of a partisan asymmetry in misinformation sharing which cannot be attributed to political bias on the part of raters, and indicate that Republicans will be sanctioned more than Democrats even if platforms transition from professional fact-checking to Community Notes.
Authors
- Mohsen Mosleh (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7313-5035)
- David G. Rand (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8975-2783)
- Thomas Renault (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4838-4755)
Institutions
- Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (FR)
- Internet Society (US)
- University of Oxford (GB)
- Centre d'Économie de la Sorbonne (FR)
- Institute of Cognitive and Brain Sciences (US)
- Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (FR)
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Published
- 2025-06-16
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2502053122
- Citations
- 3
- Primary Topic
- Misinformation and Its Impacts
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 12.60
Funders
- Fondation HEC