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.
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.
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]
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by slinches on Thursday February 08 2018, @05:08PM (2 children)
Have you looked at the list of "Junk News" sites they listed? They were obviously cherry picked to generate the desired results. Why is a site like Breitbart on there while none of the progressive/liberal propaganda sites like Vox, Mother Jones, MoveOn.org, etc. are?
If this is a study at all, it isn't studying what it appears to. It's from the Computational Propaganda Project at Oxford and this is their stated purpose in the about section of their page:
Note that they don't state that they are seeking solutions to stop the manipulation of public opinion and spread of propaganda, just study it. And what better way to study the effects than by creating the propaganda yourself and watching how it gets distributed? There's only so much you can do watching how other people's content is distributed because you don't know how deceptive tactics could be hidden in the methodology or in manipulation of the data or if the results are accurate, but just unexpected. Put those inaccuracies in yourself and then you know conclusively that it's fake and how transparent the attempt at deception is.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Thursday February 08 2018, @10:09PM (1 child)
Since you obiously didn't read it the first time, I'm not sure why you'd do so now. I'll take the chance, but I won't hold my breath:
You impute bias to the sites you mention. Into which other two domains do they fit as well?
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by slinches on Thursday February 08 2018, @10:36PM
I did read the methodology and reviewed the list of sources. The sites I mentioned certainly fall under the Bias, Professionalism and Style categories and could arguably fail in Credibility as well.