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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
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!
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.
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.
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.
Says the Anonymous coward who is Crying like a bitch right now! :-D
> 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.
Facts get in the way of a good story.
If you post it, they will read.
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.
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.
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.
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"! :-)
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.
The problem here is that you have dueling narratives and what is real or not is often not relevant to anyone. We've found this with all the political factions.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
Uh, isn't Oxford in the UK?
EXACTLY,
Simply wanting something does NOT constitute a crime!
Yes, the poster is a moron.
This is true, actually. And that kind of skill is to be commended. But it's not the same as critical thinking.
Surely you are not suggesting that only so called educated people engage in critical thinking every day just doing their jobs day in day out? Let alone just navigating life in general.
I think that would be a silly thing to say.
It seems to me that the promotion of conspiracy theories and fake news will play a larger part in future elections. I can easily see it being used to drive a wedge between the hard right and the primary candidate of the right. By driving a portion of their voters to someone with no chance of winning (e.g. a Libertarian candidate), Democrats could make it far easier to win elections due in part to the first-past-the-post voting.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
"Graduated Oxford USA in '4006 with honors." - Anonymous Coward, Oxford USA University President 1991-2014, Graduated Magnum Cums Loud don't check wikipedia it's all leftist lies - trust my authoritah as a Lepubrichaun, comrade!
@TheREALDonaldJPrison
"I graduated from everywhere, the best. Pretty sure Oxford is in the USA. No? I guess the Democrats gave it to the queen or something, people are saying treason. I love treason, why not? Oh it's bad? Democrat treason then."
"Comey tried to kiss me, I swear to God."
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."
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
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.
The overly PC sentiment among college students and lack of respect for others that disagree with their views is a fairly recent phenomenon.
It used to be, before it moved about 3300 miles to the left.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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.
Oxford University is hardly a bastion of liberal thinking.
Some of the famous arch-conservatives who have come out of Oxford include, Theresa May, David Cameron, Margaret Thatcher, Edward Heath, Harold Macmillan, Anthony Eden, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Louise Mensch and Dan Hannan., to name a few from the past and present.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
Since news wasn't classified as "right wing" in their methodology, maybe you just don't understand it?
Us progressives gotta up our bullshit game. Trump's hair is really a covered satellite dish streaming to Russian satellites. And it's orange due to deregulation at the hair-dye factory. Hannity made Haitian babies eat Tide Pods. Ted Cruz was caught screwing goats behind Olive Garden. The goats gave him an 8. Sarah Palin's re-translation of the Bible is really Mein Kampf in reverse if you replace every 3rd "r" with "z".
Table-ized A.I.
That is addressed in the methodology. Pardon this lengthy quote from the article:
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
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.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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.
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.
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.
Wow. Troll? Somebody doesn't like geography jokes.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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.
I actually read the full article since you wrote a halfway reasonable defense, however, there are glaring problems. As I see them, the first and probably key problem with their study is how they defined junk news (not fake news as is asserted in the misleading headline of the article on slashdot).
Professionalism: These outlets do not employ the standards and best practices of professional journalism. They refrain from providing clear information about real authors, editors,
publishers and owners. They lack transparency, accountability, and do not publish corrections on
debunked information.
Style: These outlets use emotionally driven language with emotive expressions, hyperbole,
ad hominem attacks, misleading headlines, excessive capitalization, unsafe generalizations
and fallacies, moving images, graphic pictures and mobilizing memes.
Credibility: These outlets rely on false information and conspiracy theories, which they
often employ strategically. They report without consulting multiple sources and do not employ
fact-checking methods. Their sources are often untrustworthy and their standards of news
production lack credibility.
Bias: Reporting in these outlets is highly biased and ideologically skewed, which is otherwise
described as hyper-partisan reporting. These outlets frequently present opinion and
commentary essays as news.
Counterfeit: These outlets mimic professional news media. They counterfeit fonts, branding
and stylistic content strategies. Commentary and junk content is stylistically disguised as news, with references to news agencies, and credible sources, and headlines written in a news tone,
with bylines, date, time and location stamps.
The problem here is that these criteria are incredibly subjective, and some of them are just fallacious. All news outlets sensationalize news (I'm looking at you CNN, MSNBC etc.), all news outlets are sometimes wrong (CNN tanking the stock market and sweeping the fake news awards, anyone?), all news outlets use emotional language, and are you telling me that using capitalization and punctuation "excessively" NOW MAKES YOU A FAKE NEWS OUTLET!!! WTF DO CAPS AND PUNCTUATION HAVE TO DO WITH BEING RIGHT!!!
True fake news are news stories that are demonstrably false after the facts come out. True fake news outlets are outlets that are constantly putting out false or misleading stories that use un-named sources, leave out historical facts and context. Everything else on the Oxford study's list is just bullshit so they can try to make themselves look smart and their opposition look dumb. Nice try but I wipe my ass with Oxford's credibility, and this study drives my point home.
To the discerning consumer of news, this is a BS political masturbatory hit job designed to stroke the ego of the alt left who are in the process of going down in flames as their house of cards collapses and the curtain is pulled back to reveal the corruption and criminality of the left in the US.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
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.
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.
Comey was a registered Republican for most of his life, and now considers himself an independent—presumably because of Trump. Try again.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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.
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
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.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
When your bar for how willing to engage with critics is the comment section of a news website, you have lost all perspective on what journalism is.
Hint: it's not trying to defend yourself against a barrage of trolls with Brietbart links and conspiracy theories. It's not turning your website into a cesspit of unmoderated sewage, or opening yourself up to accusations of bias by deleting troll posts.
Anyway, look at Brietbart. Often the very first comment completely debunks the story, and they just ignore it anyway. Anyone going there for news is already so far down the rabbit hole they aren't going to be convinced by the contradictory comments anyway, so what's the point?
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
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
I can't help notice the very popular "so you're saying" followed by a hallucination of what the other person didn't say. It was used to great effect during the BBC interview with Jordan Peterson when the interviewer repeatedly restated his views to him, wrongly. She did it again and again, and you're doing it now.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
And yet WAPO still, to this day, has a twitter post up that says "RUSSIANS hacked US power grid." Despite the fact that it's been admitted, even by them, that they were wrong.
This is usually referred to as "issuing a correction," and it doesn't generally involve changing history. I don't know about this instance, though the track record of accusations against the Washington Post is such that I'm skeptical of your claim, but assuming that it's true as you say then erasing the record of their mistake doesn't seem like the right move.
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's funny, because Northern Europe is doing really goddamn well currently, despite the doom-and-gloom spewed by mostly right-wing tabloids.
You can keep your "alpha male" bullshit. We don't need it.
Eat the rich.
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?
If a senior fbi official Bob tells a junior officer Joe to stop investigating one of Bobâ(TM)s friends, that is certainly obstruction of justice. Motivation, and not just actions, matter in the law.
These days, objective reality has a strong liberal bias.
Sorry, kid.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
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.
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
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.
So what do you call it when Hillary responds almost exclusively, "I don't recall"?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
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
There is nothing to prove there: there is something improper about the warrant.
Not until you prove it.
Those who filed the application used fabricated evidence and they knew it.
No one has yet proven that any substantial amount of the material in the Steele dossier is actually false. It is unverified and the FISA courts deal with unverified information all the time. Warrants are frequently granted on the word of known drug addicts and petty criminals, they're not the most trustworthy people, but if the evidence seems credible enough, then further investigation is warranted.
I repeat it, because it seems that many here do not get it: someone used fabricated evidence knowingly to get a FISA warrant. That is a very serious, concerning fact by itself.
First of all, it's not "fabricated evidence" because the FBI didn't make it up. It's questionable evidence because Steele or Steele's Russian sources might have lied. Secondly, that's only a problem if the FBI concealed those facts from the judge and the judge was incompetent enough to not ask about the providence of the Steele document. There is no claim that the FBI lied to the judge in the memo. However, Nunes' memo may have cleverly led you to believe that the judge was misled by stating something that may be true (that the FBI evidence submission didn't indicate that Hillary Clinton's campaign paid Fusion GPS for the dossier) but irrelevant (for example because the FBI evidence submission indicated it was opposition research paid for by a political campaign). Since neither your nor I will likely be allowed to see the warrant evidence until it long past having any meaning except to historians, I'm sceptical of the claims in the Nunes' memo. Which unlike the FBI warrant application, has no legal duty to state the truth, the whole truth and nothing but truth.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
I believe that is called "Reagoning" your testimony.
For clarity, "Clintoning" your testimony is when you question the meaning of every word in every question.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Since the right decided they should accuse the left of doing everything that the right actually does?
Fanatically anti-fanatical
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.
Wanting something is not a crime. Taking concrete actions to impede an investigation, such as firing someone when they refuse to shut down an investigation, is by definition obstruction of justice.
None of those are critical thinking but they are skills.
Have you ever considered that there are a lot of people that think the things you post are stupid? (I sure think you do.) You are very quick to handwave away any criticism you receive as just trolling. Maybe people have just finally written you off as a troll and ignore you now?
I doubt that's the main inroad the Russians had.
My bet is it's more a matter of two things: 1) Trump is utterly ignorant of the boundaries of law for the presidency, such that he really doesn't understand that "you scratch my back and I scratch yours" behavior can be severely illegal, and 2) Trump's #1 guiding star is always his ego, and Putin was willing to stroke that ego.
My guess is that there has been a lot of direct collusion with the Russians from some of Trump's subordinates (it's the only explanation for the dismantling of State department I can see), but that Trump's knowledge and understanding of that collusion has been limited. He's probably been fed some oversimplified explanations of what's been going on, and probably supports the effort in the main, but hasn't had much direct interaction. My bet is his subordinates would prefer it that way: it keeps him in power, which keeps them protected (for now).
It will be interesting to see how it all shakes out as Mueller's probe comes to a head. I'd honestly be shocked if his subordinates who did the most collusion didn't take the care and effort to retain some evidence that pointed the finger directly at Trump. Trump's protection only matters as long as they themselves aren't targeted, and I doubt they're strong enough ideologues to continue following him once it no longer serves their interests. If Mueller's probe gets to them, they benefit greatly by pointing the finger up the chain, and can only do that effectively if they've retained some evidence. Trump's only hope is that his subordinates are just as incompetent as he is, or that the Republicans try something dramatic to halt the investigation (though that will only buy him until next year, if the midterm elections turn out like the special elections we had last year).
Prove what? The fact that they omitted to say that dossier was paid by political adversaries of Trump? The fact that they omitted to say that the corroborating source Yahoo News was in fact the same source? The fact that Steele was a known critic of Trump, per Ohr testimony? They used a libellous source at best.
These are claims. You are not able to prove they are true, and I am not able to prove they are false because neither of us is allowed to see the actual warrant applications, hearing transcripts, or any of the related classified materials.
Nunes says there is something improper, but he has all the motivation in the world to find something improper and other people say he's wrong. Furthermore, Nunes' chose to prevent the minority party on the intelligence committee from releasing their opposing viewpoint, which tells me that he is not confident that his criticisms will withstand actual scrutiny. You can't be "for transparency" while only allowing half of the story to be told.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Look, their criteria was:
Granted, the criteria seem a bit subjective. For instance, if a web site uses a lot of "hyperbole, misleading headlines, unsafe generalizations and fallacies, emotionally driven language" but very little "ad hominem attacks, excessive capitalization, moving images, graphic pictures and mobilizing memes", does it count as "bad style" or not?
But it's interesting that none of the top-voted comments here responded by saying "I'm conservative but I prefer conservative sources that don't meet these criteria, and I'm concerned about the prevalence of conservative sources that do." Instead I'm seeing responses like "they should have counted CNN as junk news!" (really, CNN should be on the list when Fox News is not?) or "these criteria are unfair because they single out conservative hyperpartisan media! so the criteria should have been changed!"
Perhaps "they didn't study the actual content being shared" as RedK suggests, but in order to evaluate the 5 criteria they must of course have evaluated samples of each site's content.
This study is just utter garbage. As you indicate, they have rampant selection bias and that is part of the problem, but the stories that they cite to classify Breitbart and Hannity.com (as just a random sampling) are 100% true and accurate https://politics.slashdot.org/... revealing that this study it'self is fake news, which is highly ironic considering every alt leftie on the planet likely believes adamantly it is accurate.
The study is just a fake news alt left hit piece to try to portray their opposition as stupid and themselves as intelligent.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like