Network Propaganda : the two sides are not equal

Could be an interesting read.

The book’s title, “Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics,” is a mouthful, but the book’s message is almost simple. The two sides are not, in fact, equal when it comes to evaluating “news” stories, or even in how they view reality. Liberals want facts; conservatives want their biases reinforced. Liberals embrace journalism; conservatives believe propaganda. In the more measured but still emphatic words of the authors, “the right-wing media ecosystem differs categorically from the rest of the media environment,” and has been much more susceptible to “disinformation, lies and half-truths.”

“Network Propaganda” does refute some favourite liberal explanations for the results of the 2016 election. The authors acknowledge the sustained efforts of fake-news Web sites from the nations of the former Soviet Union, as well as the work of Russian hackers and bots, but they are not convinced that their impact was significant. They also downplay the influence of the Facebook-targeting work done by Cambridge Analytica, and they write that Facebook’s news-feed algorithm was of only modest importance. Rather, it was the feedback loop of right-wing quasi-journalism that had the most impact—and that hypothesis has profound implications not only for the study of the recent past but also for predictions about the not-so-distant future.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/a-new-book-details-the-damage-done-by-the-right-wing-media-in-2016