A fake news site owner said conservatives are more likely than liberals to believe and spread fake news. In fact, he said fake news didn't take off with liberals at all. I want to verify this. How easy would it be too replicate this experiment?

Edit: Found some links. Couldn't find the original article though.

0. Republicans seem more susceptible to fake news than Democrats (but liberals, don’t feel too comfy yet)

http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/05/republicans-seem-more-susce...

1. Article that says both left and right visits his fake news site.

http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/article/2017/may/31/If-...

2. Democrats are falling for fake news about Russia

https://www.vox.com/world/2017/5/19/15561842/trump-russia-lo...

3. The rise of left-wing, anti-Trump fake news

http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-39592010

I think that is going to be really difficult to discern with any accuracy. The different mindset of the two parties will likely lead to differences in the types of things that each will believe, but I don't believe that either group is immune to believing made up stories.

I have also found that the losing party tends to suffer from the wildest delusions. I'm not really sure why that is, but it is always sad to watch.

>I have also found that the losing party tends to suffer from the wildest delusions.

I would disagree with you on this statement. The far right is consumed by conspiracy theories (Seth Rich, Pizzagate etc) despite controlling all three branches of the Federal Govt.

Very hard to verify, but you could probably dig up some related data if you tried hard enough. Possibly things like fraud reports?

I was thinking of making my own sites to spread fake left and fake right news and tracking clicks.

> A fake news site owner said conservatives are more likely than liberals to believe and spread fake news. In fact...

Why would you believe what a "fake news" site operator tells you?

Smug "I am too smart to be fooled" liberalism, I'd guess, based on the fact this legitimate point is currently being downvoted.

It's being down voted because it's an accusatory, non-answer to a speculative statement. The parent comment literally stated "I want to verify this." It's not a legitimate point in any sense of the word legitimate.

I'd have myself a hard think about what lead you to writing such a comment up.

I don't. It matches anecdotes at best. That's why I want to verify it.

That makes sense.

Ironically though, just as another anecdote (and to the best of my knowledge), the very first "fake news" right-wing site who's operator was confronted, ended up being a left-voting liberal who [paraphrasing] "hated conservatives and people on the right, and wanted to spread disinformation to them to pollute their arguments".

But I guess we'll never know, so the best solution is still non-censorship.

> Facebook tried doing this to combat actual fake news (the one that ironically comes from the political segment in the U.S. most likely to cry wolf about it). This process was then characterized as facebook policing political content in a biased manner -- despite the fact that blatantly false content happened to continually come from sources with a conservative bent more often than not, which isn't Facebook's problem to deal with.

Assuming we followed the same Facebook story (that intentionally set up boards of people - that were biased - to curtail the news in various ways), it seems like what you are trying to say is that alternative and conservative news is "fakes news", and they should receive algorithmic censorship.

Personally, for myself, the last 10 stories I've seen on "neutral" outlets like CNN and to the left outlets like Washington Post / New York / MSNBC - have been 100 percent driven by agenda rather than facts.

And the only time I'm able to get anything real is when I go to the other side, in which case all I have to do is tone it down 50%, yet on the left I have to literally invert what they are saying to get at the truth.

So how would you categorize which one of us is the idiot whose sources of news should be curtailed? Because I'm actually fine with you listening to CNN.

Reports that the Texas gunman was Muslim were fake news in the truest sense; no relation to the truth and used primarily to promote racial hatred.

Does anyone have any sources of major news outlets reporting that the Texas gunman was Muslim? The problem is treating tweets as "news" and this is a problem by media outlets left and right. There are all kinds of tweets that are false and misleading that trend in both right and left circles why do we only complain about one side.

Major news outlets, no. Not so major outlets, sure.

All the Googling I've seen seems to point to a "Santa Monica Observer" as the primary source of this claim. (See the Snopes article: https://www.snopes.com/texas-samir-al-hajeed-sam-hyde/ ), Snopes also links to a "Freedom Daily" and there are a couple of other sketchy news websites with this claim.

The Snopes article also mentions that a comedian known for trolling-style pranks (Sam Hyde -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Hyde#Hoaxes_and_pranks ) is tangent to these claims. So my best guess is that you are correct, someone treated a trollish tweet or post as actual news.

I'm not sure why bias is brought up all the time in "fake news", because bias is not the same as fake. Nobody should have issues with conservative news that is known for better vetting, even if their bias is strong (your Wall Street Journals, National Review, etc.). Fake is fake whether it comes from the right or the left. It is true that conservative fake news was much more prevalent in the 2016 election (https://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/fakenews.pdf), but "progressive" fake news definitely exists.

The tweets exist on "both sides." Sure. But how effective and endemic are these misleading tweets in each sphere?

I'm having a real hard time thinking of analogous lies on the left that have readily observable support or momentum in comparison to misinformation like the origin, religion, or race of a mass murder and/or claiming that an elected president wasn't actually born in the U.S.

Hard to dismiss such misinformation that's heartily consumed and propagated in whatever sphere as just being "tweets" or saying "it exists over there too!" when the effects of said misinformation in each sphere are significantly different.

>it seems like what you are trying to say is that alternative and conservative news is "fakes news", and they should receive algorithmic censorship.

That's an incredibly disingenuous if not an outright idiotic comprehension on what was stated. If a source continually propagates blatantly false news it doesn't matter what the political bent is. It's going to lose credibility. Just like if someone is continually caught in a lie, you might stop listening to them, regardless of what race, religion, sex, or gender they are. You're not censoring them, you just know taking them at their word is a losing gamble.

The fact that a host of popular conservative sources continually participated in spreading false and misleading information isn't the fault of any content aggregator, and in this case Facebook certainly wasn't at fault. In fact, it seems like a problem that should be earnestly addressed within the conservative sphere, instead of conveniently using it to bolster a political platform and help with general ad revenue.

If you want to spit out little pathetic buzzwords and engage in intellectual lukewarmness, that's your prerogative. But you're going to have a hard time attempting to cry victim, or censorship, and engage in false equivocations when other people or organizations stop taking these sources seriously and choose to stop lending them a platform to spread lies and conspiracy theories.

> yet on the left I have to literally invert what they are saying to get at the truth.

Okay, well. I didn't realize I was dealing with unmitigated idiocy here. I'd have saved myself the key presses.

> outright idiotic comprehension

> spit out little pathetic buzzwords

> dealing with unmitigated idiocy here

With all due respect, your post contains some content, but this isn't behavior for HN and I'm really surprised it's being tolerated, let alone upvoted. Do you somehow expect to change any opinions with an insult-riddled comment like that?

So two things. You quoted three things, all 3 five words or less. At most that leaves 15 words across 3 paragraphs. Hardly worth drawing attention to.

Not that it really matters, because everything that was stated was pretty justified. It's curious that you take issue with my post or its tone, and not that out right dishonest response I was negating.

Looking at your posting history, and your continually false and misleading statements regarding all things geopolitical, I can only assume you're here to cause a stir. With all due respect.

I agree with your content but completely disagree with your delivery.

Did you come here from reddit? It's unnecessary and inappropriate, and I don't think that kind of behavior is 'justified' in response to someone you consider uneducated.

As for my (respectful) posting history: I only post when I feel that something has yet to be pointed out by anyone else, which will naturally be the more uncommon opinions and/or devil's advocate type of questions.

>Did you come here from reddit?

This is directly against the rules.

>It's unnecessary and inappropriate

No it's pretty appropriate. I didn't say anything uncalled for. Especially when someone is being dishonest. Congratulations on not being able to discuss the subject matter in your attempt to completely derail the conversation.

>devil's advocate type of questions.

Or just misinformation.

You're outnumbered on HN.

You're right he is, but if being outnumbered opinion-wise now leads to downvotes, I feel skeptical of HN's future.

Would we still upvote those who deny climate change for discussion's sake, for example?

> Would we still upvote those who deny climate change for discussion's sake, for example?

Why would you do that? There are plenty of opinions that are primarily "discussed" in bad faith, and that's one of the more significant ones.

Historically, if you look at past discussions, we've had great conversations by upvoting any comment that adds a new perspective to the mix.

If an ideal society wishes to eliminate climate change denial, for example, it won't be through silencing and stigmatizing their beliefs; it'll be through respectfully listening and debating.

As an example, I was rather unaware of the debate against climate change until reading a discussion on HN from people who were oft characterized as 'deniers.' One, for example, believed there were more immediate problems to be solved, and the other wasn't convinced by the science. It was a productive discussion, and I feel that everyone is better off having it, yet I fear that it wouldn't be condoned today without a mass of downvotes.

At this stage of the matter, it is quite possible that you fell for exactly the sort of bad-faith 'discussions' that pjc50 mentioned. Two forms of this are the repetition of thoroughly-debunked arguments and the injection of non-sequiturs (as I don't know what you are specifically referring to, I cannot say for certain, but most of what appears in this domain falls into at least one of these categories.)

I agree that there is no point in downvoting this sort of thing, but it is unfortunate if it gets upvoted by people who are not in a position to judge its validity. Scoring arguments on style is not the way to go (even if that is how the SAT essay is scored.)

Some people are down voting him for name calling. Both republicans and democrats suffer from a persecution complex on HN. It's kind of funny.

All sites are agenda driven. But somehow sites with agendas that I disagree with are more guilty of bias. Funny how that works. Fake news, on the other hand, is claiming global warming is hoax invented by the Chinese. I would say only 10% of my facebook friends are conservative and I've only seen them post blatant lies like photoshops of black NFL players cheering the burning of a US flag. The liberals, at worst, get a little too excited about the Russian investigation. Though that has as much merit as Hilary's emails.

> Some people are down voting him for name calling.

I was surprised by the downvotes to a fairly argued comment, and then I read this hours ago and it seemed valid. The most upvoted comment in response now, however, calls him 'idiotic' several times throughout.

When someone says that I cannot discern fake from real, and for my own well being I should be protected from "fake news" (otherwise I'll start to believe that global worming is real / not-real), than I'm being treated like I'm some type of an "idiot", so why hide that word.