Did a study awaiting peer review find that conservatives are banned from Twitter at a higher rate than liberals?

A recent study, still awaiting peer review as of January 2023, found that conservative Twitter users are suspended from the platform more frequently than liberal users. Researchers said this disparity is largely explained by conservative users sharing more misinformation.

In 2020, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Yale and the University of Exeter randomly sampled 4,500 conservative Twitter users and 4,500 liberal users from a pool of 100,000 users who shared hashtags related to the U.S. presidential election. By July 2021, users who shared the #Trump2020 hashtag were 4.4 times more likely to have been suspended from Twitter than users who shared the #VoteBidenHarris2020 — 19.6% versus 4.5%.

Researchers note this isn’t necessarily evidence of political bias. They found that conservative users “shared information from much lower quality sites” than liberal users, according to two separate trustworthiness assessments: one by experts and another by a politically-balanced group of laypeople.

Editor's note: The previous version of this brief, titled "Does Twitter have an anti-conservative bias?" has been narrowed to accord with Gigafact's current editorial guidelines regarding inferring intent.