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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.
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]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Joe Desertrat on Thursday February 08 2018, @10:37PM
"Lamarckism" was a mostly honest attempt to provide a mechanism for variation and heredity before it was accepted that those things were anything outside the realm of God. Lamarck ended up of course being mostly wrong, although some of his idea lives on as epigenetics. The reason that so many in the field are so adamant about separating themselves from Lamarck is that his ideas were almost invariably misrepresented to further personal agendas, for instance the example of Lysenkoism given by the AC below your post.
If you're curious about the subject and want to fill a few holes in your knowledge, the book Blueprints: Solving the Mystery of Evolution by Maitland A. Edey and Donald C. Johansen gives a nice history in layman's terms of how the idea of evolution evolved (although they occasionally bog down in "dialogues" attempting to hammer down a point - a minor personal gripe - for one who needs it that probably helps a great deal). The book is almost worth it for the last chapter alone.