Naio posted:https://www.theguardian.com/te...university-of-oxford
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 university’s “computational propaganda project”, looked at the most significant sources of “junk news” shared in the three months leading up to Donald Trump’s 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.
Oxford long ago abandoned its dreaming towers for socialist goals, rather like so many American universities. Like our academia, the dons of Oxford would argue that give them just one more chance and communism will work (another million or so slaughtered, goes unspoken, of course).
That the source is the Guardian is a hoot. I receive their email newsletter. Its extreme left wing all the way, of course.