Fake news sharing in US is a rightwing thing, says study
Source: The Guardian
Fake news sharing in US is a rightwing thing, says study
University of Oxford project finds Trump supporters consume largest volume of junk news on Facebook and Twitter
Alex Hern
Tue 6 Feb 2018 09.59 GMT Last modified on Tue 6 Feb 2018 12.25 GMT
Low-quality, extremist, sensationalist and conspiratorial news published in the US was overwhelmingly consumed and shared by rightwing social network users, according to a new study from the University of Oxford.
The study, from the universitys computational propaganda project, looked at the most significant sources of junk news shared in the three months leading up to Donald Trumps 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.
The research involved monitoring a core group of around 13,500 politically-active US Twitter users, and a separate group of 48,000 public Facebook pages, to find the external websites that they were sharing.
Users who shared similar collections of links were grouped together depending on what they were discussing: on Twitter, some identified cohorts included Conservative Media, Trump Supporters (a distinct group from Republican Party) and Resistance; on Facebook, those audience groups included Hard Conservative, Womens Rights and Military/Guns.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/06/sharing-fake-news-us-rightwing-study-trump-university-of-oxford
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Related: Polarization, Partisanship and Junk News Consumption over Social Media in the US (The Computational Propaganda Project at Oxford)
Proud Liberal Dem
(24,437 posts)People writing "fake news" stories have said that they have pretty much given up writing left-wing-oriented "fake news" because most people on the left are generally more skeptical and tend to fact-check more. Imagine that.
The Polack MSgt
(13,192 posts)Sounds like the Water Is Wet Department of No Shit Sherlock College to me
hedda_foil
(16,375 posts)It looks to me like they checked for Russian news sources, which aren't widely shared by either side instead of bots and trolls of dubious origin.
Skittles
(153,193 posts)that is kind of obvious