Slashdot Mirror
Fake News Sharing In US Is a Rightwing Thing, Says Oxford Study (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Low-quality, extremist, sensationalist and conspiratorial news published in the U.S. was overwhelmingly consumed and shared by rightwing social network users, according to a new study from the University of Oxford. The study, from the university's "computational propaganda project", looked at the most significant sources of "junk news" shared in the three months leading up to Donald Trump's first State of the Union address this January, and tried to find out who was sharing them and why. "On Twitter, a network of Trump supporters consumes the largest volume of junk news, and junk news is the largest proportion of news links they share," the researchers concluded. On Facebook, the skew was even greater. There, "extreme hard right pages -- distinct from Republican pages -- share more junk news than all the other audiences put together." The research involved monitoring a core group of around 13,500 politically-active U.S. Twitter users, and a separate group of 48,000 public Facebook pages, to find the external websites that they were sharing.
Blue collar workers aren't less smart. They are less trained to think critically.
If you post it, they will read.
Only an ivory tower academic who has never held a real job would make a statement as stupid as the one you've just made.
The hyperbole is probably unnecessary. At the very least, it just weakens your argument.
Trades like plumbing, electrical, construction and manufacturing all require excellent analysis and reasoning skills. These practitioners are often dealing with real world problems and situations that are several magnitudes more complex than anything ivory tower academics deal with.
This is true, actually. And that kind of skill is to be commended. But it's not the same as critical thinking.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
It's not? In what way, exactly? You're saying it hasn't been infected by the PC far left SJW culture that is widespread throughout the ivory towers of academia? You're going to need to cite some sources with examples of tolerating conservative thought.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Lay off the Kool Aid, broham.