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) by khallow on Friday February 09 2018, @12:10AM
Let us note that we have not been provided with the raw data, but rather heavily processed, high level data. So no, we haven't been provided with "the data". And as I noted, the methodology is fundamentally flawed due to the subjectivity of the "coders" who decide what is "junk news". I since have looked for indications that they addressed the problems in their methodology. I didn't find anything in either the research paper or the online supplement. It's not an onerous burden to devote some portion of the write up to such an important issue.
Finally, there is a second serious flaw in the methodology in that they do not consider the impact of automation of fake news propagation. Would the "Right" still be the most promiscuous without the apparent flood of Russian fake news spread by shill accounts? The time frame in question would contain at least part of the peak period of fake news creation.