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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.
Tomayto, tomahto though.
If you believe something that the rest of society disagrees with, that is the definition of extremist.
In America, the liberals have focused on the college educated while the conservatives focused on the blue collar workers, at least over the past 10-20 years.
It is harder to trick college educated people into believing false statements.
QED, fake news gets picked up by the blue collar workers, and certain conservative politicians have decided to appeal to this demographic, so they don't publicly fight against the fake news.
The liberals on the other hand are led by college educated people that disbelieve and fight against the fake news.
It's not that the liberals are immune nor that the conservatives are susceptible. It's just a result of demographics.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
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.
It's funny that you say that, because the so-called "blue collar workers" that you're ridiculing are often the most independent and honest thinkers out there.
They haven't spent 80% or more of their lives sitting in safe space classrooms being told exactly what to think by some professor or other academic "expert".
They don't waste their time with quizzes and tests and papers and exams where they mindlessly regurgitate whatever their professors told them.
These "blue collar workers" have been out practicing a trade or a craft, and spend their days neck-deep in the realities of the world at large.
They know more about reality than any college student, or especially an academic, likely ever will.
They see things as they really are.
Having seen the world with their own eyes, they know when academics or the media are full of shit.
And it turns out that academics and the media are full of shit a lot!
Here you are trying to paint "blue collar workers" as being "dumb", yet they're often the people with the highest degree of real-world intelligence.
You wouldn't be aware of that, of course, because you're probably never left the confines of whatever sorry campus you're trapped within.
> If you believe something that the rest of society disagrees with, that is the definition of extremist.
If I may say, no. Violently enforcing your opinion would be extremist. Mere disagreement is hardly extremist.
> It is harder to trick college educated people into believing false statements.
It is certainly possible to do so.
Trump isn't a Russian spy... He is a dupe, a sucker, a useful idiot for Putin. He's gone from mere dupe to a willful participant though.
Trump's a chump. How are those coal mining jobs? Pennsylvania hiring tens of thousands of coal miners yet? Guess Trump isn't the sucker. He got his.
A leftist institution publishes a study that only the rightists news is fake? Naaaaaah... no possible way for bias in that!
The fact that you think Oxford is "leftist" says all we need to know about your relative level of education.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
No? They are certainly democrats, and not moderate democrats by any stretch.
This is completely unsupported by the actual facts. The FBI is overwhelmingly conservative and Republican, both the rank & file and the leadership. This has been true for many years. To claim otherwise is probably a side effect of the cognitive dissonance you are currently experiencing.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
Says the Anonymous Coward :-D
Okay, I'll bite. I'm not an anonymous coward, and I think you're a fucktard too. Also, you're incredibly gullible. The sooner you admit that to yourself, the better off you'll be.
CNN was SO afraid of the Comment section... They removed it ENTIRELY.
Lots of websites have removed their comment section. Mostly because of the fucktards.
Isn't that Funny?
It's more of a statement about how persistent fucktards can be.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
Stand down, there. You weren't conned into funding Bernie. Bernie was the better candidate in almost every way. We should vote for the better man. We should fund the better man.
There's fake news and there's problematic news. The bots will push both if they think either is useful, but that doesn't make problematic news fake news. The Democratic party really did shoot itself in the ass by intentionally hamstringing Bernie. If they hadn't for example delayed the debates (which are massively helpful for putting candidates on the map such that you start to look into what he/she candidate offers) Bernie's numbers would have been enough to win. If you look at his progress as a graph you can see he passes Clinton if the race goes on longer or starts earlier -- and the race really only gets started after the first debate, so delaying the debate made Clinton, who had more brand recognition at the outset, inevitable. And there's no way Trump could have beaten Bernie -- He was shown in multiple polls to be significantly further ahead of Trump than Clinton. (The polls had a systematic anti-Trump bias, but in a Trump vs. Bernie vs Clinton poll that would even out and so doesn't matter for these polls.) We have the Democratic party to thank for Trump.
So long as you didn't vote for Trump or stay home, you did the right thing.
As for your money needing to go to Hillary, it wasn't lack of money which kept her from winning. She outspent Trump almost 2 to 1. In large part it was HOW she was spending it. TV advertising costs a fortune, doesn't do much to move people, and is the primary expenditure for most campaigns (second to payroll for Clinton). It gets the most spending because the campaign folks who place the ads get a percentage back from the TV stations. It's TV spending that makes campaign folks rich. For numbers, look at these URLs: http://metrocosm.com/where-doe... and https://www.bloomberg.com/poli... In retrospect, it's clear she needed more legal staff to contest voter suppression and more ground staff to get people to the polls.
Still anecdotal, but I miss the rational Republicans. Long time since I've spoken to one.
I think what made them really disappear was Alan Greenspan crying in front of Congress, admitting that the economic theories he based our fiscal policy on for decades were based on flawed premises. When guys like Paul Ryan try to argue for supply side economics, knowing full well that the only true test for economic theories—history—has proven the theory to be everything its critics have accused it of, it's almost more infuriating to hear them pretend to be rational.
Something had to replace the intellectual libertarians who lean on their highly theoretical ideas about how to optimize the economy. Hopefully populism, jingoism, and a complete disregard for rationality are just stop-gap measures while the GOP rediscovers itself. Unfortunately, the GOP has long been the party of convincing the ignorant to vote against their own interests. The "supply side" rationality of Reagan and his ilk and the xenophobic rancor of Trump and his cronies are just different methods for convincing those who know nothing about economics to vote for those who seek political power as a means for reinforcing their economic power.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
I don't come here for that stuff in the first place, I don't care for your reply, I don't care for your message or your tone, I'm not here for divisionist political crap. US VS THEM!
The entire internet has become nothing but a battleground the last few years and it's ridiculous, I'm here for /stuff that matters/ catered to /news for nerds/ not news for political science graduates or arts students.
This is slashdot for goodness sakes.
Not the daily stormer or huffingtonpost.
Groan.
It is harder to trick people with experience in a topic into believing false statements about that topic. Come up with seductive false statements about blue collar jobs, and college educated people will believe it just as easily as blue collar workers will believe seductive false statements about white collar jobs. Likewise, after having managed and run businesses for 10 years, I've found many college graduates and academics with no real-world business experience to be astonishingly naive in their beliefs about how business works.
The problem isn't primarily lack of education as you've concluded. The problem is once people want to believe something (like believing education is the primary distinguishing factor), they stop being objective. Once they want to believe something, they've already decided a certain conclusion is desirable. Any evidence they see will be filtered through that desire. Conforming data will be accepted with little to no skepticism. Contradictory data will be sifted with a fine-toothed comb and the tiniest flaw will be seen as permission to disbelieve the whole thing even if that flaw has minimal impact on its veracity. You're supposed to review the data, and use it to reach a conclusion. But it's human nature to jump to a conclusion, then pick out the data which supports that conclusion.
Very few people I've met are honest enough with themselves to accept contradictory data at face value. Real world experience is one of the few things that can force people to accept contradictory data, and usually they still need to be kicked in the pants by it several times before they'll start to accept that it might actually be correct. Education based on that experience can be useful, but outside of STEM I've found a lot of education is just selecting and presenting the subset of data which supports the viewpoint the instructor believes.
EXACTLY,
Simply wanting something does NOT constitute a crime!
Yes, the poster is a moron.
I am not a Trump supporter but his election really upset the apple cart. People invested billions in the Presidential election and ended up not getting a ROI on their investments. That tend to piss off the back room power brokers. Clinton understood she was 100% obligated to reward those who paid to get her voted President. 8 years as co-President, serving in the US Senate, and heading up the US State Department taught her how the game is played. Trump's election has reeked havoc by playing a new game. A game where he can say things that a lot of people have wanted to say for some time. Letting US allies across the world know that outsourcing their military protection comes with a price. Making NK understand they are one button push away from having their country totally annihilated. Ridiculing the little "Rocket Man" has also been a novel approach instead of genuflecting to the little fucker and succumbing to NK extortion over the past 50 years. Throwing the annihilation threat on the negotiating table should have happened 50 years ago. At least it finally got China to take their thumbs out and actually enforce the international sanctions. The Chinese are smart enough to know that unlike the US they are well within range of the nuclear fallout. NK today is the result of over 50 years of failed diplomacy that Trump had nothing to do with. A US President publically attaching conditions to US monetary handouts has also been refreshing turn of events. Trumps election also outed the media bias and politically targeted "editorial lines" and removed all doubt about there ability to publish unbiased and fact based news. Trump will be gone in a couple of years but the all the attacks on the Presidential Office will be visited upon Trumps successors. The people who are accusing the President of all types of crimes represent the scariest artifacts of the era we are living in. Their accusations and attacks have abandoned the US Constitution and Bill of Rights. They have shit canned the whole "innocent until proven guilty" idea. The ones normally railing about the FISA court are now embracing that courts actions. There will be no winner when all is said and done.
This notion of "real"-ness is really fucking irritating. The shits that blue-collar workers shite are no more or less real than the shits that college-educated workers shite. They stink the same. The same is true of the rest of people's lives. Intelligence is by no means the preserve of the college-educated, but neither is it the preserve of blue-collar workers. Stop spouting cliches and accept the world for what it is: a complex place.
Their bias is embedded in their method
Can you elaborate? Which part was biased?
They had a conclusion and made their study fit it
That's an assertion. It's not obvious, so it really requires an argument, maybe some facts or examples.
Classifying news as "right wing" is subjective
They don't seem to have classified the news by either 'left' or 'right', but by whether it was sensational, extremist, conspiratorial, fake or otherwise junk. They then looked at who was sharing that news the most and identified them a 'right' by such things as the fact that was how they self-identified. I think you've skimmed the summary (if that) and read what you wanted to find.
There is no scientific basis for the evaluation.
Hmm, you haven't read the paper, have you.
And you've been taken in by it.
Ah, the smugness of ignorance. The Dunning-Kruger effect in action with just a hint of delicious irony.
Basically, these leftists at Oxford labelled everything "right wing"/"conservative" as "junk" (which it arguable IS from the perspective of a snarky post-modernist leftist troll) and then they conclude that right wingers and conservatives consume junk news.
They Ranked sitesd like William F Buckley's "National Review" (one of the most respected conservative publications and sites in the USA) and "American Thinker" as "junk".
From the perspectives of most conservatives, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, WaPo and BYT are all "junk" and therefore liberals/leftists consume the most "junk news"...how do ya think they'd like them apples?
This "study" is not a study at all... it's an illustration of propaganda masquerading as an academic study.
> for example, the Russia collusion story... fake or real? Some will say real... some will say fake. Which is it? There's no evidence but it could be real... it could also be fake.
Well to say there was guaranteed collusion from Trump is fake, or at least currently unverifiable.
To say there's proof of Trump being blackmailed due to Russian prostitutes is baseless.
However all the following are verifiable:
There's an ongoing investigation into the matter by the FBI.
That Trump's form National Security advisor Michael Flynn pleased guilty to lying to the FBI about discussions with the Russian Ambassador.
That Trump Junior was happy to meet with Russians for dirty on Hillary without thinking of the consequences.
If it turns out Trump is innocent on any collusion, or only guilty of minor misconduct because he didn't stop and think, it wont have made most stories about it "fake".
Normally fake news (by its pre-Trump usage) is so fake it's painful, e.g. pizzagate.
It's turtles all the way down.
Which three? Remember, the sites had to meet ALL of the criteria in order to qualify for the seed group.
Except that's not what they did at all. Your still arguing from what you want the study say rather than what the study says. You are a good example of the study's findings.
You are welcome on my lawn.
It's more than just a group of "humans" sitting around and picking sites at random.
From the study:
It includes a lot more than professionalism and style. There is a larger set of criteria, and the sites had to fit ALL of the criteria to be included in the seed group.
You are cherry-picking sentence fragments from the study in order to spread misinformation about it.
You are welcome on my lawn.
If a junior FBI agent wants to pursue something and the senior agent in charge tells him he prefers he work on something else, that's not obstruction of justice.
Similarly, when the President tells his subordinate the FBI Director what he thinks about an investigation, that's also not obstruction of justice. He literally can't obstruct justice by telling the FBI head to stop investigating someone. The President is the head of the executive branch and as such, he is constitutionally the head law enforcement officer and prosecutor. He has every legal right to make decisions, recommendations or whatever he wants as part of that authority. In fact, the Constitution goes so far as to give him the unilateral power to completely pardon someone for any crime against the Unites States for any reason whatsoever. The only remedy against his decision making is for Congress to impeach him, and even then they can't un-pardon someone he's already pardoned. That's it.
Also, as borne out by your own WIkipedia link, Obstruction of Justice is typically about lying about or hiding information from an investigation. It has nothing to do with expressing your views to the head of the FBI.
If you read the study, you'll see what plenty of others have commented on.
They started with a "seed" list they created themselves out of thin air of 91 sources they decided were "fake". You know, sites like the National Review and Sean Hannity. 95% of their initial manual seed list lean right, 5% lean left. Then they did some math and a relationship matrix to show that right-wing-leaning people view right-wing-leaning news on social media more than left-wing-leaning people do. (That's all the study actually shows, even if taken completely at face value.) Then they labeled their conclusions as something else. To have any chance at proving their conclusion, they'd need to start with a list evenly divided between left and right news sites. Of course, even then they'd need to figure out some way to ensure they had a reasonably representative seed list. Instead, they did a study with a foregone conclusion, which is why so many people find it naively biased.
All of Western Europe is a flaming dumpster fire of deranged stupidity that will collapse on it'self in the next 20 years or so and all of Europe will soon be one great Caliphate with the heads of the infidels on steel pikes at every city entrance. And they will have done it to themselves... That or they will all have a mass conversion to hard core conservatism, arm themselves and take back their countries, but I am not holding my breath, too much inbreeding and beta males in Europe. All the alphas moved to he colonies generations ago.
Cool.
I didn't know that, last time I checked we were doing pretty well for ourselves here in Western Europe.
I mean, granted, we do have a vocal minority of fear-mongering racists, but eh, what can you do?
Admit nothing. Deny Everything. Make Counter-accusations.
Study confirms that the authors write left wing junk research to re-enforce their liberal bubble.
See, this is the problem with right wingers. There's an article about a study about you.
Your only reply is "NO theres a study that says YOU like fake news", except there isn't. That would be a fake claim.
The 91 sites of far left wing phd's selected a
Also a fake claim, you have no evidence to back it up.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Oxford University is a "leftist institution"?
You actually just demonstrated why the right is often so gullible. Anything that contradicts your established view is written off as a conspiracy by your enemies, no matter how outlandish and divorced from reality that conspiracy theory is.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Here is a list of the sites (page 6 onwards): http://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/wp...
As you can see, it does include a number of left leaning sources. However, it does have to be said, most of the junk "news" is coming from the right, particularly sites like Infowars, Hannity etc, and there are simply not left leaning equivalents. The left just doesn't have conspiracy theorists with TV show/online soy pill shops pumping this crap out.
A whole community of pretend news sites and blogs has built up around sites like Infowars, dedicated to spreading and amplifying that content and getting it distributed on social media. It was a deliberate effort, and it wasn't replicated on the left.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
So you say there is no objective way to distinguish the reporting of, say, the NYT from that of the National Enquirer? Let me guess, you also think that the Institute of Creation Research publications are just as valid as those in PNAS?
Stephan
For example, the study relies on a list of sites known to have fake news, with a "representative article" for each site.
The classification they use is "junk news", not "fake news". They describe the criteria for fake news in the paper, and if you read it carefully you will see that a story being true does not exclude it from also being junk news. It's entirely possible to present the truth in a way that distorts it, for example.
In other words they are not providing you with examples of fake news, they are providing you with the URLs they looked for to collect data on how often sites to junk news were linked to.
They are NOT commenting on the accuracy or truthfulness of the linked articles.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The burden of proof is on the accuser.
Which in this case is those trying to discredit the investigation. They not only need to prove that there was something improper about the warrant, they also need to prove that the alleged impropriety of the warrant is relevant to the Mueller investigation. Neither of those things has been even substantiated, much less proved.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
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.
He had no legal requirement, but one of the interesting things that came up in his testimony is that it was because of Bill Clinton's highly irregular boarding of Attorney General Lynch's plane that Comey felt there was a duty to be as clear as possible that that event hadn't impeded the investigation. In other words, if Bill Clinton hadn't pulled that stunt, then Comey wouldn't have announced the re-opening of the investigation (since if he hadn't announced it promptly, and that later came to light, it might have appeared to be because of Bill Clinton's influence).
I'm not saying his decision was the right one, but I can appreciate that he was between a rock and a hard place there.
(I originally up-modded your post, which I generally agree with, but then decided a comment was preferable)
Maybe explain why article 1 states Nixon obstructed justice because you make it sound like a sitting president is not capable of obstructing justice. Secondly the pardoning powers were never intended to self pardon so that you may continue your crime spree in office while congress tries to act fast (fast is months to years), there is absolutely no precedent for that. The real danger is the creep we are seeing in political openness to stating they are openly corrupt - this is getting worse on both D and D sides as they get more and more comfortable being above the law.
None of those are critical thinking but they are skills.