An interesting short paper on internet-based fake news. Some highlights :
It is important to be clear about how rare this behaviour is on social platforms: The vast majority of Facebook users in our data did not share any articles from fake news domains in 2016 at all... this is not because people generally do not share links. If anything, those who share the most content in general were less likely to share articles from fake news–spreading domains to their friends. Thus, it is not the case that what explains fake news sharing is simply that some respondents “will share anything.” These data are consistent with the hypothesis that people who share many links are more familiar with what they are seeing and are able to distinguish fake news from real news.
Republicans in our sample shared more stories from fake news domains than Democrats; moreover, self-described independents on average shared roughly as many as Republicans. A similar pattern is evident for ideology. Conservatives, especially those identifying as “very conservative,” shared the most articles from fake news domains. This is consistent with the pro-Drumpf slant of most fake news articles produced during the 2016 campaign, and of the tendency of respondents to share articles they agree with, and thus might not represent a greater tendency of conservatives to share fake news than liberals conditional on being exposed to it.
There was an article I can't find right now that suggested that the reason there's so much more right-wing fake news content might also be because that media is produced in a greater volume because that political demographic is more vulnerable to it. Another factor, I suggest, is sheer necessity. Trump's policies are abjectly evil - they do not represent a different set of moral values, they are simply, objectively, demonstrably ethically bankrupt. But no-one wants to see themselves as the baddies (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKcmnrE5oY), so it's necessary to create a completely different, false narrative.
Another factor (which doesn't seem to have been examined very much so far as I'm aware) is the secondary spread of fake news. The most obvious manifestation is this can be found in just about every sentence that escapes Trump's mouth. Beholden as they are to report on what the so-called President says, this inevitably means spreading fake news on mainstream media. Fake news sources could conceivably have other effects on what the mainstream choose to report. Few enough people may actually subscribe to InfoWars, but far greater numbers are aware of it because it is (or was) not just found on the internet. I would also point out that this paper explicitly only deals with fake news rather than hyperpartisan sources; a perfectly understandable approach but I suspect the two are not so dissimilar.
Aside from the overall rarity of the practice, our most robust and consistent finding is that older Americans were more likely to share articles from fake news domains. This relationship holds even when we condition on other factors, such as education, party affiliation, ideological self-placement, and overall posting activity. It is robust to a wide range of strategies for measuring fake news (see Materials and Methods). Further, none of the other demographics variables in our model—sex, race, education, and income—have anywhere close to a robust predictive effect on sharing fake news.
Of course that doesn't imply that age itself is a causal factor. It might be, or it could be that the older generation are more ideologically inclined towards right-wing nuttery because that kind of stuff ("No blacks, no Irish" etc.) was more socially acceptable during their primary education period.
Collected thoughts on fake news and how to deal with it here and the link therein :
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+RhysTaylorRhysy/posts/izrupauy1it
http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau4586
“fake news domains” — Who defines what a “fake news domain” is?
ReplyDelete“self-described independents on average shared roughly as many as Republicans.” — That's in indications that someone on the far left made the “fake news domain” list and put anything on it he or she does not agree with.
“pro-Drumpf” — I'll stop right here. There is a lot to criticise about Trump and that's fine. But once you start spelling Trumps name wrong you loose all credibility.
Reminder: I'm one of those radical centrists and self-described independents which just got slandered in that article.
Martin Krischik Who defines fake news ? For the purposes of the study, they do. There is simply no other way to proceed. One could relabel it to something like "sites which meet these criteria" or even simply "this particular list of sites we've drawn up" but it wouldn't change the conclusions.
ReplyDeleteIt's an American study so I wouldn't expect European independents to necessarily be comparable. I myself am a lefty, but given the current state of politics there's no way I'd vote for any of the major UK parties at present. I can recall at least a few occasions where I've accidentally reshared fake content and been called out for it. Sometimes (as in the Humour collection, which I do not fact-check) I didn't care but sometimes I did.
Your point about the independents being far left is interesting. I would naively expect the far left to reshare just as much fake news as the far right, after correcting for the amount of available material. But AFAIK they didn't investigate (or at least I didn't see it) the political ideologies of the independents so there's no evidence to assume that they really are far left (they do explicitly discuss left wing fake news in the paper and control for differences in the numbers of self-declared political affiliations). And many of the independent candidates at the last US election hardly seemed like socialists to me. It would definitely be interesting to explore this in more detail though... my suspicion (but only a suspicion !) is that the Republican party is more synonymous with far right than the Democratic party is with the far left, though American politics in general is most certainly much further to the right than European standards.
I'd agree that a published paper loses all credibility if it spells Trump's name wrong, but that's not what happening clear. See, I've got John Oliver's "make Donald Drumpf again" Chrome extension installed, so it's my fault, not theirs (I assumed everyone would be aware of this by now since I've been using it since day one).
Martin Krischik the actual article says political ideology wasn't relevant, that the effect was due almost entirely to the inverse correlation between age and online media literacy, with conservatives sharing more because there was more fake news that aligned with their beliefs, and because they tended to skew older.
ReplyDeleteThe list of domains included left and right leaning publications, and was originally compiled by BuzzFeed. That being said the authors found the effect held even with other lists of domains.
BuzzFeed had run two previous studies, one indicating that more conservative fake news was being published, and the other that fake news in general drew more likes and clicks.
The real interesting result from the study is that fake news appears to be spread more by bots than humans, and that humans appear to have finally failed the Turing test on Twitter.
Martin Krischik Let's start with such fact-checking orgs such as snopes.com - Snopes.com . Begging questions such as "who defines what a fake news domain?" is a bit Pilate-esque "quid est veritas" - fake news does not survive a fact check and those sites which promulgate such lies are fake news sites. There ,,,, you are.
ReplyDeleteAs for who makes up fake news, there is a simple recipe for effective propaganda: start with as much of a story as will survive scrutiny and fill in the rest to suit your purposes. You don't start with a point of view. You start with some evidence and dissect away all the complexities which might not suit your purposes.
But there is another sort of propaganda: the Big Lie. But as with Paragraph 2, there must be just enough truth to glue the whole thing together. Yes, Barack Obama was not born in the continental USA. And Donald Trump has lied about Barack Obama's birth certificate hundreds of times. Big Lies are even simpler than half-truths.
As for the spelling of Donald Trump's name, the family names is indeed Drumpf. Gwenda Blair's porky about some lawyer in Kallstadt changing his name - well, it didn't happen. Trump is an Americanisation which never involved a legal name change, you see. Facts are hard things.
You weren't slandered at all. You're taking umbrage where none was offered.
Martin Krischik The article source doens't read "pro-Drumpf", but "pro-Trump". It's likely that was transcribed by someone using the Make Donald Drumpf Again browser extension.
ReplyDeleteGo ahead and read. You might accidentally learn something.
Or at least, if you don't, avoid getting sucked deeper into your ideologically-driven conspiracy-idiocy vortex.
"fake news domain"
ReplyDelete.fk?
en.wikipedia.org - .fk - Wikipedia