The Effect of Misinformation Intervention: Evidence from Trump’s Tweets and the 2020 Election

Abstract

AbstractIn this study, we examine the effect of actions of misinformation mitigation. We use three datasets that contain a wide range of misinformation stories during the 2020 election, and we use synthetic controls to examine the causal effect of Twitter’s restrictions on Trump’s tweets in the 2020 presidential election on the spread of misinformation. We find a nuanced set of results. While it is not always the case that Twitter’s actions reduced the subsequent flow of misinformation about the election, we find that in a number of instances content moderation reduced the flow of social media misinformation. We estimate that Twitter’s actions, on the universe of tweets we study in our paper, reduced the flow of misinformation on Twitter by approximately 15%.