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

It's really a low IQ thing

[Anonymous Coward]

Tomayto, tomahto though.

Re:It's really a low IQ thing

[quantaman]

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.

Re:It's really a low IQ thing

[quantaman]

This means the right tends to believe their authorities without question, while the left tends to question everything.

So what you're saying is that the Left, which has adopted a policy of "Listen and Believe" and "Lived Experience > Facts" is actually the side that tends to question everything?

"Tends to", I'm describing human behaviour, there's obviously some oversimplification. The left generally backs institutions that embrace skeptical questioning, like Universities and the legal system. And they're more trusting of institutions that seem to have checks built in.

I'm not sure where you get "Lived Experience > Facts" from, that's hardly an ethos I'd associate with the left, in fact I'd weakly associate it with the right.

The only way this could possibly be true is if you assume that all the "classical liberals" pushed out of the left by the rise of Progressive Culture Communism aren't really right-wing even though the "Right" only exists in terms of "The people Leftists don't like," so I'm not sure how you plan on getting that to work out logically.

Again, oversimplification. But classical liberals would have been better fits as conservatives. Either way I'm talking about people who currently make up the main blocks of the political left and right and I don't think there's many classical liberals left in the GOP. Some are rebranding to libertarian, some moderate or even democrat, and some abandoning classical liberalism and embracing trump.

Furthermore, if you really think that authoritarian thinking exists solely on the right... well, I don't know what to say to someone who believes something so absolutely ludicrous.

I'd say take the argument seriously rather than dismissing it through oversimplification. I hardly think you would have bothered to stick around for the series of books where I made sure asterix was fully explored.

Re:It's really a low IQ thing

[Applehu Akbar]

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.

You haven't visited a college campus in this century, have you?

Re:It's really a low IQ thing

[Bongo]

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

Re:It's really a low IQ thing

[Applehu Akbar]

They may be a minority, but in their ability to shut down entire dissenting campus events and to dominate the cultural scene, they have an influence behind their numbers.

So, what are the sites?

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

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!

Re: Hmmmm....

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:It's really a Hillary For Prison Thing

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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

[Antique Geekmeister]

> 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.

You have to know your suckers... Er, audience.

[shanen]

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.

Re:You have to know your suckers... Er, audience.

[wonkavader]

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.

Re:You have to know your suckers... Er, audience.

[RazorSharp]

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.

Trump isnt a Russian spy...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:It's really a Hillary For Prison Thing

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Hmmmm....

[zieroh]

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.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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

[zieroh]

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.

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

[hey!]

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.

Re:Hmmmm....

[eriks]

Uh, isn't Oxford in the UK?

Re:Hmmmm....

[Anonymous Coward]

"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."

Re: It's really a Hillary For Prison Thing

[CrankyFool]

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."

Here's a simple test for news source fakeness.

[hey!]

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.

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

[PopeRatzo]

It is amusing to watch, isn't it? First you define anything Republicans like as fake. Then you check to see if Republicans or Democrats absorb more fake news. Of course, your results confirm your selection process.

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.

Re:It's really a Hillary For Prison Thing

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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

[shilly]

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.

Re: Hmmmm....

[another_twilight]

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.

BS gap

[Tablizer]

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".

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

[dgatwood]

Conclusion: The actual facts show that you're full of shit.

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.

Re:depends on how you define fake news

[bug_hunter]

> for example, the Russia collusion story... fake or real? Some will say real... some will say fake. Which is it? There's no evidence but it could be real... it could also be fake.

Well to say there was guaranteed collusion from Trump is fake, or at least currently unverifiable.
To say there's proof of Trump being blackmailed due to Russian prostitutes is baseless.

However all the following are verifiable:
There's an ongoing investigation into the matter by the FBI.
That Trump's form National Security advisor Michael Flynn pleased guilty to lying to the FBI about discussions with the Russian Ambassador.
That Trump Junior was happy to meet with Russians for dirty on Hillary without thinking of the consequences.

If it turns out Trump is innocent on any collusion, or only guilty of minor misconduct because he didn't stop and think, it wont have made most stories about it "fake".
Normally fake news (by its pre-Trump usage) is so fake it's painful, e.g. pizzagate.

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

[PopeRatzo]

So basically in their methodology, the effluence of semi-official propaganda organs is described as "real news"; and dissenting views are labeled "fake news".

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...

Re:It's really a Hillary For Prison Thing

[quantaman]

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?

Re:Hmmmm....

[sg_oneill]

A leftist institution publishes a study that only the rightists news is fake? Naaaaaah... no possible way for bias in that!

Well the Guardian might have bias , but this does not reflect on what the actual study says.
So heres the abstract

What kinds of social media users read junk news? We examine the distribution of the most significant sources of
junk news in the three months before President Donald Trumpâ(TM)s first State of the Union Address. Drawing on a
list of sources that consistently publish political news and information that is extremist, sensationalist,
conspiratorial, masked commentary, fake news and other forms of junk news, we find that the distribution of such
content is unevenly spread across the ideological spectrum. We demonstrate that (1) on Twitter, a network of
Trump supporters shares the widest range of known junk news sources and circulates more junk news than all the
other groups put together; (2) on Facebook, extreme hard right pagesâ"distinct from Republican pagesâ"share
the widest range of known junk news sources and circulate more junk news than all the other audiences put
together; (3) on average, the audiences for junk news on Twitter share a wider range of known junk news sources
than audiences on Facebookâ(TM)s public pages.

Suggestion: Argue the topic, dont shoot the messenger

Re: Hmmmm....

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Liars, Damn Liars

[f3rret]

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?

Re:Hmmmm....

[AmiMoJo]

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.

Re: It's really a Hillary For Prison Thing

[Jesus H Rolle]

General Flynn was an honorable man. I don't know what he did to make the dark state so angry - but clearly he did *something* to precipitate his purge. I believe he was trying to protect the Republic from its many enemies within.

General Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI regarding his Russian contacts. Drop the conspiracy theories already.

Re:Very flawed study

[AmiMoJo]

For example, the study relies on a list of sites known to have fake news, with a "representative article" for each site.

The classification they use is "junk news", not "fake news". They describe the criteria for fake news in the paper, and if you read it carefully you will see that a story being true does not exclude it from also being junk news. It's entirely possible to present the truth in a way that distorts it, for example.

In other words they are not providing you with examples of fake news, they are providing you with the URLs they looked for to collect data on how often sites to junk news were linked to.

They are NOT commenting on the accuracy or truthfulness of the linked articles.

Re:It's really a Hillary For Prison Thing

[phantomfive]

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.

Re: It's really a Hillary For Prison Thing

[JoshuaZ]

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.

Re: It's really a Hillary For Prison Thing

[swillden]

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.