An Oxford University study being spread by mainstream news outlets that claims Trump supporters share the most fake news is itself fake news.
Researchers at the Computational Propaganda Project, who are the recipients of over $200,000 in taxpayer funding, spent “several years” developing its “junk news” list, which is actually full of the most popular conservative websites on the internet.
Websites on the researchers’ “watch list” of propaganda news outlets include the Washington Free Beacon, the Daily Caller, National Review, and the Drudge Report, which is the seventh most highly visited media publication in the United States.
Contrary to the claim that conservatives are sharing the most fake news, the study proves nothing other than finding conservatives tend to share conservative media online. – READ MORE
[give_form id=”79809″] [divider][/divider]A Yale-published study claiming to mirror Facebook’s new methodology for sorting “broadly trusted” news sources from partisan news inadvertently undermines its author’s own advocacy of the methodology by listing far-left sites Salon.com and HuffingtonPost as “mainstream” while packing its “hyper-partisan” category with right-of-center news sources.
Politico ran with the headline “GOP voters trust CNN, N.Y. Times over Breitbart, InfoWars.” A more accurate headline would have been “Single Working Paper With Questionable Methodology Shows GOP Voters Trust CNN Over Breitbart.” But that probably would have got them fewer clicks.
What the study actually shows, by the authors’ own admission, is that mainstream media sources are most likely to achieve a “broadly trusted” rating by surveyed subjects due to their name recognition, not due to the quality of their journalism.
In the study, the authors admit that if Facebook were to sort news on the basis of “trustworthiness” surveys, it would favor established, mainstream outlets and punish new media — because newer, unfamiliar sources are less likely to be trusted. – READ MORE
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