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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: 2) by meustrus on Thursday February 08 2018, @09:05PM
That depends on whether you are talking about social conservatism or economic conservatism.
On the social side, you would have a good argument; the kind of "traditional family values" that Republicans use to motivate their base are not values that the wealthy have ever shared. As such, I would challenge you to name any politician that actually lives out those conservative values, right or left. But regardless of who is promoting it, the argument can definitely be made that social conservatism is defined by that majority of people that are not wealthy or powerful enough to elevate themselves above their community - those whom you have labelled "poor", but whom I would simply call "normal".
Economic conservatism, however, is anything but a domain of the poor. It is, ultimately, the un-American notion that those people who currently have wealth and power ought to be able to keep their wealth and power for eternity. The economic status quo always leads to aristocracy, something which is forbidden by name in the Constitution.
The promise made to the poor by economic conservatives is and has always been that:
Some people may continue to fall for this promise year after year, but that doesn't mean it was "driven by community", nor that it was ever "a domain of the poor".
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?