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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.
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.
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."
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.
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.