Oxford study: Idiot deplorables spread fake news in social media way more than liberals
In case you missed it (for some reason, about the only coverage we saw was in Newsweek):
Fake news published in the U.S. was overwhelmingly consumed and shared by right-wing social media users, a new study from the University of Oxford has revealed.
Research from Oxford’s “computational propaganda project” investigated into the sources of “junk news” shared in the three months leading up to President Donald Trump’s first State of the Union address last month.
On Facebook, they found that “extreme hard-right” conservatives shared more fake news stories than all other political groups combined, while on Twitter, Trump supporters consumed the most fake news.
The full study is available here (unusually, in Microsoft Word). Here is one of the key points:
[W]e see that the Trump Support Group has a coverage of 96%, indicating that those pages share the widest range of junk sources on Twitter. This is followed by the Conservative Media Group, with a coverage of 95%. We also see from Table 1 that the Trump Support group, with a consistency score of 55%, contributes more to the spreading of junk news, compared to all other groups put together.
The report contains a multitude of data from both Twitter and Facebook, and after an actual read, yours truly can give his own executive summary:
The “deplorables” are gullible rubes.
‘Nuff said!
