In response to intense pressure, technology companies have enacted policies to combat misinformation1,2,3,4. The enforcement of these policies has, however, led to technology companies being regularly accused of political bias5,6,7. We argue that differential sharing of misinformation by people identifying with different political groups8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15 could lead to political asymmetries in enforcement, even by unbiased policies. We first analysed 9,000 politically active Twitter users during the US 2020 presidential election. Although users estimated to be pro-Trump/conservative were indeed substantially more likely to be suspended than those estimated to be pro-Biden/liberal, users who were pro-Trump/conservative also shared far more links to various sets of low-quality news sites—even when news quality was determined by politically balanced groups of laypeople, or groups of only Republican laypeople—and had higher estimated likelihoods of being bots. We find similar associations between stated or inferred conservatism and low-quality news sharing (on the basis of both expert and politically balanced layperson ratings) in 7 other datasets of sharing from Twitter, Facebook and survey experiments, spanning 2016 to 2023 and including data from 16 different countries. Thus, even under politically neutral anti-misinformation policies, political asymmetries in enforcement should be expected. Political imbalance in enforcement need not imply bias on the part of social media companies implementing anti-misinformation policies.

through the lens of critical media literacy, I argue that shitposting exists as an online pedagogical technology that can potentially reorient the network of relationships within social media spheres and expand the possible range of identities for those involved. To illustrate this argument, I conclude with a close reading of posts from two Twitter accounts: dril, an anonymous user who has managed to inform political discourse through his shitposts, and the corporate account for the Sunny Delight Beverage Corporation. I describe how tweets from these accounts engage shitposts in divergent ways. In doing so, I contend that these tweets reveal shitposting’s potential for contributing to the democratic aims of critical media literacy education, but the appropriation of that practice by large corporations and individuals imbued with political power jeopardize that already fraught potential.

Beyond the narrow framing of previous literature that only considers the use of shitposting for social exclusion or as fascist propaganda, I argue for an encompassing approach to this discursive tool that embodies a polysemic and open-ended cultural politic.

The analysis presented here shows that the circumstances under which shitposts circulate hold significant information when trying to understand the potential of these texts within a critical pedagogy. Expanding this assertion to consider other discursive technologies, it follows that both public pedagogy and critical media literacy research must continue to examine not only media itself but how pieces of media circulate, considering both who (or what) this media circulates between and where in that circulation people can begin to challenge the digital milieu.

I contend that positioning shitposting as a uniform tool in terms of its politics within previous scholarship misrepresents the practice. Instead, shitposting can serve a multitude of pedagogical ends depending on how individuals and groups use shitposts.

shitposting represents one tool within this broader, holistic understanding of public pedagogy, albeit one that often manifests unintentionally. By producing turbulence within social media, shitposting can contribute to the public pedagogies of social media that mirror the goals of critical media literacy education. However, a deployment or engagement with public pedagogy does not guarantee a critically oriented outcome.