NDM 30

Fake news sharing in US is a rightwing thing, says study- The Guardian

The article states how findings through the University of Oxford, that shows findings of  Trump supporters consume largest volume of ‘junk news’ on Facebook and Twitter

• “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,” - Researcher

• 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.

• “The two main political parties, Democrats and Republicans, prefer different sources of political news, with limited overlap,”

The study came from the university's “computational propaganda project” looking a 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 find out who was sharing them and why.

•  “extreme hard right pages –distinct from Republican pages – share more junk news than all the other audiences put together.”

• “The Trump Support group consumes the highest volume of junk news sources on Twitter, and spreads more junk news sources, than all the other groups put together. This pattern is repeated on Facebook, where the Hard Conservatives group consumed the highest proportion of junk news.”

They people people who Users who shared similar collections of links were grouped together depending on what they were discussing: on Twitter, some identified cohorts included “Conservative Media”, “Trump Supporters” and  on Facebook, those audience groups included “Hard Conservative”, “Women’s Rights” and “Military/Guns”.

The study revealed how the two main parties consumed different sources of news and shows how easily some are swayed on news which is not resourceful and back up by evidence.