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posted by martyb on Thursday February 08 2018, @11:20AM   Printer-friendly
from the it's-a-right-wing-thing dept.

Fake News Sharing in US is a Right-Wing Thing, Says Study

A study by researchers at Oxford University concluded that sharing fake and junk news is much more prevalent amongst Trump supporters and other people with hard right-wing tendencies.

From the Guardian:

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.

Polarization, Partisanship and Junk News Consumption over Social Media in the US

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 Trump'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 pages—distinct from Republican pages—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 Facebook's public pages.

http://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/polarization-partisanship-and-junk-news/

[Ed. note: page is loading very slowly; try a direct link to the actual report (pdf). --martyb]


Original Submission #1Original Submission #2

 
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  • (Score: 3, Offtopic) by hemocyanin on Friday February 09 2018, @06:12AM (1 child)

    by hemocyanin (186) on Friday February 09 2018, @06:12AM (#635408) Journal

    Hillary voted for the Iraq war with enthusiasm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtK9AzcU42g [youtube.com]

    Her only beef with GWB, at 13:29: "Here at home, this administration is bankrupting our economy forcing us to make the worst kids of false choices between national and homeland security, which they don't fund."

    In other words -- raise taxes to fund more wars and domestic surveillance.

    That's all fact -- her own damn words.

    You don't get to make a "mistake" like HRC did on Iraq, and say "oopsie". She was, is, and will always be, an evil murderous cretin who deserved to lose. And losing to Trump? That's just fucking icing on the cake - seriously, how incompetent do you have to be? Talk about a slap across the face, she can now go shrivel up in shame and leave the world a better place.

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  • (Score: 2) by edIII on Friday February 09 2018, @07:55PM

    by edIII (791) on Friday February 09 2018, @07:55PM (#635673)

    Is this a segue-way to a different conversation? :)

    I was on the Hillary hating bandwagon before 2000. It was shortly after she made such a fuss about health care, and then basically did a 180, started taking money from the opposition to entertain them at dinner. To make it clear, for me, that's like Luke Skywalker giving multiple hour long speeches to young Rebels, then turning about and asking the Emperor if wants another mimosa before going down on him. Maybe I was unfair at the time, but her subsequent actions showed that she really did start blowing the 1%. She's a darling of the "Left", but is nothing more than an Establishment Democrat with Corporate handlers.

    So yeah, I said Hillary was being made to look worse than she already did. They needed to go so far as to make her a vampiric kiddie fucker with basement operations under various pizza establishments, one in particular. That's some pretty spectacular Fake News, exceeded only its ridiculousness, by the gullibility of those that found it true.

    --
    Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.