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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 11 2018, @03:55AM
We in America decided that Dems are more liberal than Reps.
Yeah... An look what it got ya! How is it that the party of Richard Daley and George Wallace is in anyway "liberal" compared to the party that actually sent in the army to desegregate the schools and had to help vote in the voting/civil rights acts?? Who was the guy that signed the EPA and OSHA into existence? Somewhere you all got your wires crossed. You can compare republicans to democrats only in the same way you can compare virus to bacteria. One is not necessarily worse than the other, only different. I mean, like, which venereal disease would you rather have? Sorry, people who vote republican or democrat don't know fake from real, or they are looking for a piece of the action, and I sure don't sympathize with that bunch!