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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.
Isn't it wonderful that you can repeat their study? That's the nice thing about actual science.
Good luck with the random pictures that get corrupted and photoshopped to further their own beliefs. Left wing news might be biased and some recent even wrong... But you can mostly go back to the source to verify.
Who accused him of anything he didn't do? Obstructing justice is a felony. By any account he's more guilty of that than Nixon.
Has been busted fabricating news ON VIDEO, no less than 2 DOZEN times in the past decade alone... This "Study" is likely just more leftist BS.
I'm just going through the paper right now, but there's a ton of sketchy and indefensible assumptions.
For example, the study relies on a list of sites known to have fake news, with a "representative article" for each site.
Taking one at random, apparently this news article was enough to get Breitbart listed as a "fake news" site.
The problem is that the article in question is completely and totally accurate, but was probably branded "fake news" because it went against the narrative of many Hillary supporters.
Another entry shows hannity.com, and the link (no longer working at Hannity) was about an undercover journalist who managed to impersonate Huma Abedin at the polling station; effectively, able to vote as someone else.
A quick search shows that this actually happened, it's a Project Veritas sting, and there's a youtube.com video of the incident.
It is immediately apparent that neither of these "representative" articles is fake in any way. I couldn't even find inaccuracies or bad framing in the articles - there's no sound reason to say that these are examples of fakery.
This paper does not at all rise to the level of quality and fact-checking that a published paper should have!
It's nothing more than a leftist hit piece.
Note: Check out the people who post one-line insults as a response to an organized argument with links. To mis-quote Chris Farley: "They're awesome"! :-)
But the study is biased. So why repeat it? Their bias is embedded in their method. They had a conclusion and made their study fit it. Classifying news as "right wing" is subjective. There is no scientific basis for the evaluation. And you've been taken in by it.
Wanting the FBI Director to go easy on investigating his crony, and firing him when he refused to pledge loyalty.
Bragging to a foreign power (***Russians***) that firing the FBI director lifted a weight off his shoulders
Wanting to fire the NEXT FBI Director when it became clear the investigations were reaching closer to his inner circle.
And I won't go into the sordid details about Sessions.
And the kicker is, its not even just about obstruction. Follow the Russian money, through Deutsche Bank, to various Trump Organization entities. Ok, you dont have to, Mueller is.
All this idiotic "there is no proof of collusion/crime" is either willful ignorance or desperate pleading. Do you think a smart prosecutor/investigator reveals his/her intentions or evidence before an indictment is ready? Not everyone has the self-discipline or neediness of a 4 year old boy.
We spend more than any other OECD country on K-12 education - and our students typically end up near the middle, or in the bottom half. Spending != performance, at least in the US.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Impeding an investigation is by itself a crime, irrespective of whether or not the investigation is into a crime that is later proved to be prosecutable, or the prosecution wins. As https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... notes, "If the person willfully and knowingly tried to protect a suspect." Key word here is "suspect". So when Flynn was being investigated -- by definition, a suspect -- Trump attempting to take the heat off of him was "willfully and knowingly" trying to "protect a suspect."
It's not about education. It's about political orientation. This peer-reviewed article from Oxford University's Computational Propaganda Project, would seem to indicate, very specifically, that when it comes to fake news, people on the Right are less likely to engage in critical thinking and more likely to "listen and believe". That's not me saying that, it's the study (which you can read here and also learn about their methodology). And that's just the most charitable interpretation. It's also possible that they know the fake news they are sharing is fake, but just don't care.
http://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/re...
You are welcome on my lawn.
I know it's heretical to even suggest it, but if you read the (peer-reviewed) article, you will learn that your characterization of this research is completely wrong.
You are welcome on my lawn.
That is addressed in the methodology. Pardon this lengthy quote from the article:
You are welcome on my lawn.
Can you elaborate? Which part was biased?
They classified the news by whether it was sensational, extremist, conspiratorial, fake or otherwise junk. This is completely subjective and the source of their bias.
There's so much wrong with this study that it could be a study itself in how bad research is done. The most glaring is that the author of this tripe laid out an arbitrary categories of what the author believes to be what is and is not a legitimate news site. Many of which have little to do with what the information reports actually is, but the style in which it is presented. One of the most glaring examples of which is that The Drudge Reported is considered fake news. Drudge is little more than a basic news aggregator. It's also very questionable that while there is a list of sites that are considered 'junk' it does not say why exactly each site is considered 'junk'.
So accusing Donald Trump of being a Russian agent isn't extremist leftist globalist fake news? Nothing that they try to throw at this guy can stick, and even Wikileaks has come up dry on him.
No, it's not "fake news". In fact, it's so compelling a case that his own deputy attorney general saw fit to assemble an special counsel to investigate. Further, his attorney general had to recuse himself from the investigation into Trump's ties with Russia because of, uh, ties to Russia.
There is 100X more meat to this than Benghazi, Hillary's emails, Obama's birth certificate, or whatever else the GOP conspiracy theory du jour is.
No, that's not even close. They didn't describe "real news" at all, only "fake news" which had to fit a set of very specific criteria, including 1) the lack of transparency in listing the names of the authors, 2) whether they illustrated their stories with lots of capital letters, memes, emotional language, etc., 3) Not listing sources or giving attribution, 4) whether the site has a distinction between news and opinion 5) whether the stories were "counterfeit". For example, several of the sites used linked to web sites that were designed to look like a well-known news source, including using a URL that mimicked the well-known source. Basically, spoofing. The sites had to meet all of these criteria in order to qualify for the seed group.
The methodology is entirely laid out in the study's text and in the supplemental documentation provided.. Your characterization isn't even close to the methods that they used. In a way, your willingness to misrepresent what the study said is a pretty good example of what the study showed: The desire to spread mis-information in order to try to advance a right-wing agenda.
Again, here is the link to the full peer-reviewed study:
http://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/re...
You are welcome on my lawn.
So accusing Donald Trump of being a Russian agent isn't extremist leftist globalist fake news?
Except I see very few people on the left accusing Trump of being a Russian agent, I won't say no one, but I haven't seen anyone on my FB feed claim it, and I have a lot more FB friends on the left than the right. And I've seen a ton of claims on the right that are at least as conspiratorial as that.
Now there's suspicion it's possible, it was alleged by the Steele Dossier, and people discussed the possibility at the time, but when no evidence of that accusation turned up people generally stopped talking about it.
Nothing that they try to throw at this guy can stick
You mean nothing aside from 4 members of his campaign already being charged (and two pleading guilty), including his campaign manger and National Security advisor.
Not to mention proving multiple instances of members of the Trump campaign contacting or seeking contact with Russian officials and lying about that contact, including Trump's Attorney General and his son.
And we know there are active investigations into money laundering that involve Trump's son in law, obstruction of justice involving Trump, and probably a lot of other things that, like the Papadopoulos plea, we haven't heard about yet because it's being kept secret.
and even Wikileaks has come up dry on him.
What do you think Wikileaks is? They're not an elite investigative body, they post documents that people give them. How is them not having been given dumps on Trump exculpatory in the slightest?
Hell, they haven't posted his tax returns despite those being one of the single most sought after documents out there. Does that mean you think Trump never got tax returns?
I stole this Sig
Well the Guardian might have bias , but this does not reflect on what the actual study says.
So heres the abstract
Suggestion: Argue the topic, dont shoot the messenger
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
No again. Nothing in the study describes (or mentions) "real news". There is a set of criteria which are indicative of fake news. If a site meets a certain threshold for those criteria, then it was eligible for inclusion in the seed group.
Please stop mis-characterizing this work. Or if you're going to mis-characterize it, try to find a basis that is not so easily refuted by the actual study, which is freely available and makes its methodology clear.
You are welcome on my lawn.
See this is where it's proven fake news. Trump junior meets with a lawyer in the US to receive freely offered information he didn't get, apparently illegal according to everyone on the left. At the same time, Hillary hires a foreign spy to pay for information from Russian government officials, completely magically legal because reasons. When the left is howling for both of them to be locked up, I'll agree there might be something wrong with what Trump's team did.
Also, wasn't Trump's electoral team being wiretapped fake news, right up until it wasn't?
In general, republicans no longer believe your "rational" sources, because they've been caught helping Hillary cheat the nomination away from Bernie, cheat in the debates, and have repeatedly been caught lying about Trump, and won't touch the stories that will make or break our nation, like a sitting president using the DOJ/FBI to spy on the other team's people during an election. We know these things happened, without a doubt, yet the left are still spinning it as something "normal people can't understand" (that's from Pelosi, who thinks Republicans should just shut up and trust her for some reason).
Based on what I just recently read this is not true.
(emphasis mine)
From what I've gathered so far es a European trying to stay on track on current events, the main issue is this: FISA applications are not public information. It is not possible to know what evidence besides the memo was used in the application and how much (if at all) the memo eventually influenced the decision. Now. to me it seems the republicans are taking full advantage of this fact and trying to portray the memo as the singular piece of evidence on which the whole thing hangs upon, because they know that they cannot be disproven without the releasing of classified material, meaning their backs are covered.
So instead we should believe a memo written by a party that has a vested interest in the investigation and does not (cannot in fact due to the classified nature) release full details on the state of the investigation and seems to be crafted precisely to appear to say something it indeed does not say (that the memo was the primary reason/piece of evidence used for the application) and thus to give a misleading picture of the state of things? Huh? How does that make sense?
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
It is not possible to know what evidence besides the memo was used in the application
Well, another piece of evidence used in the application was the infamous Yahoo News article, which was based on a controlled leak by Steele himself. So there are at least two pieces of evidence which were invalid. Not only that, it is clear that someone tried to inflate the available evidence for the application with a classical propaganda tactic, that is the controlled leak (the same tactic used by Dick Cheney as a pretext to start the Iraq War).
Now. to me it seems the republicans are taking full advantage of this fact and trying to portray the memo as the singular piece of evidence on which the whole thing hangs upon, because they know that they cannot be disproven without the releasing of classified material, meaning their backs are covered.
The burden of proof is on the accuser. You can say that the Democrats are taking full advantage of that fact to downplay the undisputed fact that (some of) the evidence given in the FISA application was fabricated, by them and the Clinton Campaign (which was the same thing given what Donna Brazile and Wikileaks said).
General Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI regarding his Russian contacts. Drop the conspiracy theories already.
You realise that about half of the cabinet in the UK's Conservative government have degrees from Oxford? And that they're regularly invited back to speak, as are other members of their party (in which Oxford graduates, particularly Oxford PPE graduates, are severely overrepresented)? And that the last two Conservative Prime Ministers (along with 25 previous Conservative Prime Ministers) are Oxford graduates, and that all of them have kept ties with the institution after they left?
Oh, and that Oxford is not a campus university, so 'tolerated on campus' is a meaningless idea.
Conservatives are not 'tolerated' in Oxford, they are cultivated, groomed, and sent to join the party.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The closest thing to "RUSSIANS hacked US power grid" that the WAPO appears to have ever tweeted is this: https://twitter.com/washington...
Breaking: Russian hackers penetrated U.S. electricity grid through a utility in Vermont
Which is true. Where is this inaccurate tweet you speak of?
I'm not interested in supporting WAPO here, I'm just suspicious when people frequently claim that tweets and articles exist but don't bother linking to them.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Except I see very few people on the left accusing Trump of being a Russian agent, I won't say no one, but I haven't seen anyone on my FB feed claim it, and I have a lot more FB friends on the left than the right
This comment was posted directly above yours. You have unusual friends tbh. You're lucky, I get tons of "Russia Trump" spam in my feed.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
> That Trump Junior was happy to meet with Russians for dirty on Hillary without thinking of the consequences.
Which is funny because the DNC was just pranked by some Russian radio hosts in the same way and he was all to eager to get naked photos of Trump.
I'm sure someone will cry "fake news" but there are recordings. His claim is that he didn't actually fall for it and that he reported it, but that seems a bit off.
Here is one for you...
Clinton PAID for Russian propaganda to affect the election, this is now proven.
FBI and DOJ used this propaganda to illegal get a FISA warrant on Carter Page, lying 4 times to get it, and allowing them to wiretap most of Trump's staff because of how FISA warrants work, this is now proven.
So we have ACTUAL EVIDENCE of Clinton, FBI, DOJ, and State Department colluding with Russia to affect an election, yet no investigation.
So claiming an investigation means nothing. EVIDENCE means something and we have a LOT of it, just pointing the wrong way.
Please note WaPo and NYT printed tons of articles that colluding with Russia is NOT ILLEGAL once it was found out Clinton was colluding with them. You SHOULD be asking, what are they investigating then?
Thank you for demonstrating fake news in a nutshell. Even in the Nunes memo acknowledges that the Steele dossier wasn't the only input in question. Moreover, Carter Page was under US law enforcement surveillance before the Steele dossier even reached the attention of the FBI. Facts matters. The idea that the FBI and DOJ were somehow biased in favor of Clinton is simply silly when James Comey, a Republican appointee, was the one who announced a few days before the election that he was reoppening the Clinton email investigation when he has no legal requirement to make such an announcement.
That memos shows the FBI lying on a probable cause affidavit, to a secret court, to get a warrant for nearly godlike power to spy on a member of an anti-establishment political campaign.
No, it doesn't. For the simple fact that the Trump campaign had already fired Page (Sep 2016) when the warrant was granted (Oct 2016). Furthermore, Page claims to have never talked to or met Trump. So your claim can not be true unless the FBI has invented wire taps that can travel back in time.
Fanatically anti-fanatical