A newly-released study by the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research found that right-wing echo chambers on Facebook during the 2020 election cycle were inundated with misinformation and were far more insular than the closest liberal parallels, Forbes reports, adding to the isolation of conservatives who amplified the lies.
The study found that right-wing news outlets have far greater incidents of posts being labeled as false information by Meta’s third-party fact-checkers, with those stories rapidly circulating through the conservative Bubbles even after they were tagged as disinformation. One study found that people who used chronological sorting of posts versus algorithm-selected sorting were exposed to more diverse posts, but it also found that it did not matter for people in the right-wing echosphere, who sought out information that reinforced their views.