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.

Comments

Re:If you believe in lies, then you become extremi

[LeftCoastThinker]

Our problem with school performance has nothing to do with spending. I can push US schools to new highs with the following steps, but it would cripple the funding of the Democrat political party:

- Institute a federal school voucher system. Force the states to kick the cash to the federal government for any parent who wants a voucher. Vouchers are valid at any school that is accredited, no other strings attached. Homeschoolers get 100% coverage of all school supplies, books and any related expenses, including field trips, up to the total annual voucher. There would still be shit schools where parents who didn't care would send their kids, but that happens already, at least this way, the parents who did care (which is hardwired biologically) would make a significant positive difference.
- Eliminate the NEA and all teachers unions.
- Privatize all schools and require them to operate as non-profits with a cap of 3x local average salary for any employee and institute parental oversight on all expenditures each year. Require all finances to be published monthly.
- Require all immigrants to speak English fluently or attend a 6 month immersion course before entering regular school. Require all courses to be taught only in English, except when teaching a foreign language specifically.

I guarantee you that the US would rise dramatically in the scholastic rankings because that is what works phenomenally well when tested. Smart kids will excel, and lower IQ kids will attend trade schools so they actually have a marketable skill when they graduate (not everyone is a rocket scientist, and there is no harm in admitting that or benefit to pretending that they are.)