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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.
the 91 sites the researchers had manually coded as “junk news” I want this list; I could then put them into the corporate firewall to see which users are the most easily manipulated with gossip and rumors!
I've been paying attention to the news since the late 70's, when the Iran Hostage Situation was going on, and I was a teenager with a 4 to midnight job that let me listen to the radio at work. I listened to TV news instead of the "music" on the FM band. (others got to smoke at their desks at the time, and for coffee/lunch breaks we went into Charlie's van and smoked some of the best weed you could buy at the time). I had this job when Ted Koppel started his Nightline show, and I listened to him every night.
Even stoned me at 11 PM, after having been up since 6 AM for that 7 AM class, knew the news was heavily biased towards the left wing/liberal/progressive/whatever.
Don't believe me? Watch an abortion story, it's clear the network wants abortion to be legal. Watch a gun story, it's clear that not only does the network want to outlaw guns, they can't be bothered to learn the difference between a Ruger 10/22 and an AK-47. Watch a tax/budget cut story, it's clear they want the government to have more money.
Now the right has figured out how to get their message to more of their peeps (albeit a much smaller pond to fish in), and the lefties are going nuts.
Note I did not mention my party preference, abortion position, gun control position, nor tax/spending position. The mainstream media has been biased towards "progressive" causes for at least 40 years, now folks on the pointy end are squealing like stuck pigs.
This whole fake news thing is new and I don't know how to deal with it. Except I don't have a single social media account, I devote at least 12 brain cells to every story I read, and I assume Trump and his sycophants are lying through their teeth when they open their mouths.
What a stunning load of horseshit that is.
Somehow blue collar workers are just less smart than college educated people. Pure nonsense. There are stunningly smart people in all walks of life that didn't go to college or other.
I'll bet its no harder to trick a college person than any other person. Maybe its even easier to put one over on some so called schooled peoples because of built in prejudices like you demonstrate.
What arrogance.
I think this story (and the research it reports) is fundamentally misleading. In terms of psychological warfare, of course you need to target your victims carefully. Some targets like (or are suckers for) fake news, others not so much. Time for a bit of anecdotal evidence:
In general there are few so-called Republicans in my neck of the woods, but when I did meet a couple of them for beers before the election, I noticed that they had also been drinking the strange Kool-Aid, and hard. In particular, each of them thought Hillary was a demonic monster, but they were completely orthogonal about what was wrong with her. At the time I was mostly amused that they could believe such silly things. Looking back, I think that each of them had been successfully targeted with different flavors of fake news and the most interesting aspect is how they could be so unified in their hatred while being so divided in their peculiar reasoning.
Now in my own case, I think I was successfully targeted by a different kind of divide and conquer strategy. I was encouraged to get overly enthusiastic about Bernie to the point of firing my wallet at the wrong target. I can't prove it was done by the Russians, but I think I was quite probably targeted by pro-Bernie news and propaganda that helped divide the Democratic Party quite effectively. I never swallowed the anti-Hillary bait (beyond my basic dislike of lawyers), but I should have shot my wallet at a more useful target, perhaps the Democratic Party in Michigan?
The much more serious question is how much Putin's goons learned from the prior elections and how well they will apply those lessons going forward. Right now it looks like the Bolshevik Republicans are much more concerned with defending PARTY discipline than with defending the nation. (Kind of laughable if you know the history of the original Bolsheviks.)
Still anecdotal, but I miss the rational Republicans. Long time since I've spoken to one.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
one of the chief purveyors of the stuff during the last pres election lamented the fact that he couldn't use the same tactics with the left because the stories got debunked too fast. He wasn't interested in politics, just the ad revenue from all the sharing on Facebook & the like. He tried it with the left and it'd get debunked & shut down before he made any real money off the adverts.
The real question is how do you get the right wing folks to stop voting for stuff like trickle down economics so they'll stop thinking of themselves as a bunch of temporarily inconvenienced millionaires. Bottom line, the right is unified. They want low taxes, no regulations and religion in government. The left is just a mess. It's a lose group of Unionists, socialists, Feminists, Gun Control advocates and a hundred other things the right oppose. Folks like Bernie Sanders needs to crack the right's strong coalition if they want to get anywhere with policy. They need to get folks to start voting with their wallet instead of their gut.
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That's not what he's saying, really.
The point is that people with higher education usually gets far more training in critical thinking, rhetoric and generally gets a wider view on things. It's like standing on an elevated platform, looking at the world as opposed to looking through a periscope. Being on a mental submarine doesn't mean you're stupid, it means your view on the world outside is limited.
There's also a second point to be made, which is that people with higher educations probably generally are more manipulative and dishonest than people without, have better understanding of the weaknesses of human reasoning and better tools to exploit them. As such they tend to be more cynical about the motives of other people. I remember from my own education actually being encouraged to deliberately use fallacies, half truths etc to "win" the debates, something I found thoroughly disgusting. Again, this doesn't mean people with higher educations are all liars, it means they have been educated in a different world. Some found the thought repulsive and don't argue that way. Others revelled in it, and the worst of them seem to work for oil and coal companies and right wing politicians these days.
Speaking of that; Have you thought about how none of the people heralded as "the heroes of the average Joe", the people who supposedly will make "America great again" all have higher education, and in fact usually all have been borne with a silver spoon in their mouth, while the reviled "leftists" usually have some sort of connection to the common people? How can that be?
Food for thought.
First of all, what makes you an extremist -- left or right -- is being unable to see any validity in points of view that differ even modestly from yours. This means extremists have trouble perceiving any middle ground... or even middle-shading ground. Either you agree with them completely, or you are not a true liberal or conservative in their eyes.
Extremists subscribe to sets of ideas rather than think for themselves. If you want to know whether you truly think for yourself, ask yourself, "do I really fit in with the people who usually agree with me?" If the answer is "yes", you probably don't.
Secondly, a college education is only an opportunity to learn critical thinking, one that relatively few people take advantage. I see no evidence that college educated people as a body think more critically about news sources than blue collar people. Someone who is inclined to genuine skepticism will that hone mindset with more education, but someone inclined to be credulous will go through whatever motions he needs to graduate, and come out as intellectually defenseless as he went in.
People are not demographic robots. There are sharp-witted janitors and fools with PhDs (morosophs). Had their opportunities in life been switched the world might be a better place.
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Does it routinely issue corrections and retractions? If so it may be biased, but arguably that's unavoidable. It might even be a lousy news source. But at least it's trying to be real news, to get things factually right.
We live in an age when many people have in effect given up on objective reality. That is dangerous. Hannah Arendt, in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, notes that totalitarian regimes strive to make their subjects gullible and cynical at the same time. Purely cynical people don't go along when you need them to. Gullible people are hard to manage when they realize the truth. But someone who is gullible and cynical at the same time is perfectly tractable and docile.
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Tomayto, tomahto though.
It's not IQ.
I don't accept that there's a significant IQ gap between left and right, but even if there is there's a massive amount of overlap and it doesn't predict susceptibility to conspiracy theories.
Heck, I just saw a guy I went to High School with on FB, he was the smartest guy in his year and he bought the Nunes memo hook, line, and sinker. His intellect didn't do squat to stop him from being taken in by a smear job.
At a basic level the right celebrates authority (everyone in the tribe works together) while the left embraces individuality (everybody free to be themselves). This means the right tends to believe their authorities without question, while the left tends to question everything.
That alone doesn't advantage the left or right with finding the truth. But mainstream religion is a thing that really hates being questioned, so religion and the political right eventually merged. And religions' antipathy to intellectual authorities spread to the right as a whole. You don't even need to be religious, if you're on the right you're taught to accept your authorities without question and reject opposing authorities outright.
And once the right declared intellectually rigorous authorities to be part of the left then the left started to embrace them. Hence the right became prone to conspiracy theories as they rejected intellectual authorities and the left became resistant as they embraced them.
Of course, one can easily imagine an alternate universe where the right embraces the authority of serious scholars while the left embraces crackpot skepticism.
I stole this Sig
Statistically, as of just a couple of years ago, federal government employees were only somewhere in the neighborhood of 44% Democrat, about 40% Republican, and the rest independent. (Source: Government Executive) And in the FBI, I'm pretty sure the percentage of Democrats is significantly lower than average. So what this tells is us not that most people in government are Democrats (far from it), but rather that Republicans within our federal government found Trump so absolutely terrifying that they either did not contribute money or actively contributed to the opposing party rather than support him.
That decision had nothing to do with their political affiliation, but rather their recognition of risk. Workers in those parts of our government have seen Trump's brand of political rhetoric coming from the lips of far too many dictators and autocrats over the years, some of whom have been quite brutal. When they hear it coming from the mouth of someone running for President, they get scared sh*tless, and rightly so. Words have power, and when a president (or candidate) uses words like "treason", attacks the free press, attacks the independent judiciary, attacks the independence of Congress, etc., he is basically swinging a wrecking ball at the very foundations of our democracy. These are the actions of an autocrat—of a despot—and the ability of our country to survive with such a person as its president is the true test of our constitutional democratic system. And most people in the government were hoping that they wouldn't have to see if it can survive that test.
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At a basic level the right celebrates authority (everyone in the tribe works together) while the left embraces individuality (everybody free to be themselves). This means the right tends to believe their authorities without question, while the left tends to question everything.
That alone doesn't advantage the left or right with finding the truth. But mainstream religion is a thing that really hates being questioned, so religion and the political right eventually merged. And religions' antipathy to intellectual authorities spread to the right as a whole. You don't even need to be religious, if you're on the right you're taught to accept your authorities without question and reject opposing authorities outright.
And once the right declared intellectually rigorous authorities to be part of the left then the left started to embrace them. Hence the right became prone to conspiracy theories as they rejected intellectual authorities and the left became resistant as they embraced them.
Of course, one can easily imagine an alternate universe where the right embraces the authority of serious scholars while the left embraces crackpot skepticism.
Yes, and there's actually another level to this. It is that there are two axes or variables.
There is the aspect of, individual versus collective. That's one axis. Then there is another axis which runs vertically, called "levels". It is levels (or stages) in that societies develop and each new stage brings certain new things, over hundreds, and thousands of years.
First, levels: pre-modern to modern to post-post-modern. The pre-modern is what you are calling "authoritarian religion" which is true, most of the pre-modern world going back across the ages of empires, was authoritarian hierarchies. That's where much of religion remains today. It brought "order" to the world, by authoritarian force. And in as much as some people today continue to want a stable ordered society, they are looking to these authoritarian values. And in and of itself that's not a bad thing, because the modern world came after conditions were right, ie. stable enough, so modernity is built on top of the previous stage of authoritarian order, and if order in a nation breaks down, well democracy also goes out of the window.
Now what's interesting is that the left in America tends to be more in the modern to post-modern range, whilst the right tends to be more in the pre-modern to modern range. And to many on the left this looks like "low IQ" but that's not quite it. Rather, if you are living in more agrarian conditions, then your morals tend to be more traditional and pre-modern and authoritarian, whereas if you are living in more urban modern conditions, then your values and moral outlook tend to be more liberal and post-modern.
But what few realise is that the post-modern is built on top of the modern and the modern is built on top of the pre-modern, and that's basically what a film like Mad Max illustrates, that the moment you weaken the underlying authoritarian order of a society, all the high ideals collapse and your precious liberal values along with them. Which is why bombing Afghanistan was never going to turn it into a liberal democracy.
If you are liberal, you are affording the luxury to be liberal thanks to the existing wide social order which is the concern of the authoritarian structure, it is just that the authoritarian structure is just not the most prominent anymore, but it is still there, part of the fabric.
And in addition to the pre-modern to modern right, and the modern to post-modern left, there is also the individual/social dimensions. The modern left tends to assume that problems are because society is bad, and so you have to fix society, and for example, level the playing field, and so they favour taxes and redistribution. Whe
At least from the most top moderated comments. The study is a biased hack job, and anyone with an ounce of objectivity can see it.
Essentially, they picked 91 sites that they deemed "junk", through 5 criteria (3 of which had to be met). The problem is that they picks do not normalize for traffic and breadth, and they didn't study the actual content being shared. You might not like Breitbart, but it's not much worse than Vox/Mic/Buzzfeed and heck, even CNN, which also met at least 3 of the criteria on their list of "junk". Breitbart is also not all fake and junk. Without bias, it's hard to say they don't get some things correct. And they do offer corrections when they are wrong.
Look at the actual list of sites, it's funny Breitbart is picked (a popular right wing biased site), but not the aforementionned "popular" left sites :
http://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/wp...
DailyCaller, Breitbart, Hannity (you can not like the guy and his "tick tocks, it annoys everyone)... where are the big left sites ?
So a popular right site gets shared more than a bunch of unknown left sites ? Color me shocked. The study is about how a website with a larger audience gets more interaction on social media. It has nothing to do with their premise.
IE : they set out to prove something, and picked their sample to confirm their own bias. Next time include Vox and Mic and buzzfeed and let's see how balanced this truly is.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
In 2013, the US Department of Justice announced an indictment against Evgeny Buryakov.
During the course of the investigation, the FBI recorded Sporyshev and Podobnyy speaking inside the SVR’s offices in New York, known as the “Residentura.” The FBI obtained the recordings after Sporyshev attempted to recruit an FBI undercover employee (“UCE-1”), who was posing as an analyst from a New York-based energy company.
That undercover employee ("UCE-1") was Carter Page. He was the primary witness and worked for the FBI up to May of 2016.
But then, suddenly, in October of 2016, the FBI applies for a Title 1 FISA application against Carter Page. What is a Title 1 FISA? It says the target "is working on behalf of a foreign government". Why???
Let me tell you why! A Title 1 FISA allows the FBI to retroactively monitor all communications of not just the target, but ANYONE he communicated with as well!
The FISA warrant was an excuse that allowed the Obama WH to spy on Donald Trump's entire team.