Which side believes in more misinformation?

I used to think that the question was unanswerable because it depends on the questions you ask. People can come up with questions that conservatives get wrong ("Was the 2020 election stolen?") or that liberals get wrong ("Were 2016 vote totals changed by Russia?") Many studies do this, and they should be rejected as biased.

But a 2021 paper has convinced me that liberals are the side that is overwhelmingly closer to the truth on most factual matters.

This article found an objective way to get at the misinformation question. Researchers decided to track 20 viral stories each two week period over 6 months in 2019. Every two weeks, they grabbed the 10 most viral true stories and 10 most viral fake stories over that period.

They then recruited conservatives and liberals to see who believed in more false information, in 12 different waves. This is an unbiased method because the researchers aren't themselves deciding which questions to ask. They're looking at what articles go viral, and then asking people about them. If one side tends to see more fake stories go viral, that will show up in the data.

First finding: more conservative false stories go viral.

"Fully two-thirds (65.0%) of the high engagement true statements were characterized as benefiting the political left, compared to only 10.0% that were described as benefiting the right. The pattern among falsehoods was reversed, although the relationship was attenuated: 45.8% benefited the political right versus about a quarter (23.3%) the left."

Both sides share unflattering things about their enemies. But when liberals do it, the information they share on social media is more likely to be true.

Moreover, it could be that people at the extremes are more likely to believe false information. In fact, the more conservative you are, the more false statements you're likely to believe. "Very liberal" people do the best at this measure, and "very conservative" the worst.

Even more shockingly, the researchers controlled for the fact that more conservative misinformation goes viral. Yes, both sides were biased and more likely to believe what they wanted. But liberals were more likely to admit things against their ideological interests. They were just better informed or less biased across the board.

In sum, this is absolutely damning for conservatives

1) Conservatives share a terrible epistemological ecosystem, where false claims go viral much more often. This is not a small difference. Liberals dominate the real news industry, while conservatives are the leaders in fake news
2) Conservatives as a result believe more false information
3) One could try to argue that a few conservative "bad apples" spread misinformation, and that biases the results, because among the general public each side just endorses what makes them feel good. But conservatives believe more false information even when that is accounted for.

One might have suspected these results just from observing different kinds of news media. But this is the strongest piece of confirmatory evidence I've seen for the idea that one side is in an epistemologically superior position. The right-wing echo chamber is a major problem, and in many ways worse than the liberal establishment it criticizes.

Part of this is probably just IQ. Liberals are smarter, and smart people are more likely to believe in true things on average. Also, when tribes with slightly different means form, they can have radically different cultures. To compare conservatives to liberals, it's not enough to just ask what the average IQ or level of tribal instinct is for each group. One must understand that a group that is low intelligence and high on tribalism will form a fundamentally different culture than one with the opposite traits. This is why cultural differences are often more radical than individual differences between communities. A community is not simply the sum of its parts, but includes feedback loops.

Social science can often be very biased, but we shouldn't reject findings when the methodology being used is sound.

The simple truth is liberals are more connected to reality than conservatives.

Some examples of the false statements. You can quibble here or there with what's actually false or what the slant of a story is in a few cases, but I don't think reasonable people will find much to disagree with here.

You can find the study here, along with the actual news stories in the supplemental material. science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

For those interested in reading more, see my article "Liberals Read, Conservatives Watch TV," which takes feedback loops seriously and is broadly consistent with these results. richardhanania.com/p/liberals-rea…