Petition to change the URL (and any npr url) to text.npr.org: https://text.npr.org/2021/03/06/974394783/far-right-misinfor...

we can send any petitions to [email protected]

it helps to include a subject and a link to the submission.

This is really nice

Yes, it looks better, but (at least for me) it's missing the chart.

Facebook has become increasingly popular with older people. Older people tend to be more conservative. People engage more with content which confirms their preexisting biases. Facebook prioritizes engagement above all else because their monetization model is engagement => ad views => revenue.

The ad-funded social media giants all inevitably turn into echo chamber factories.

It doesn't seem to me the problem is with the demographic trend of Facebook users so much as Facebook executives, including and especially Mark Zuckerberg, willfully choosing to ignore the misinformation simply because doing so would negatively affect their bottom line.

I don't think it's a demographic issue either. The problem isn't older people are more likely to be conservative. The problem is that engagement-driven social media platforms profit from being echo chamber factories. It happens to the left too, even on Facebook. Nobody is safe.

> It happens to the left too, even on Facebook

The researchers said they sampled for this and did not find it was the case.

Extreme leftist facebook feed may not be statistically likely, but if it exists screencaps please, i am morbidly curious what it looks like.

I don't have a Facebook account so I cannot provide screencaps, but the article itself doesn't hide the fact that it exists.

> Those sources were placed in one of five categories for partisanship — Far Right, Slightly Right, Center, Slightly Left, Far Left — using evaluations from Media Bias/Fact Check and NewsGuard. Each source was then evaluated on whether it had a history of spreading misinformation or conspiracy theories.

This is followed by a chart which shows engagement for each category. It includes "Far Left Misinformation", which is unsurprisingly not zero. Conservative content showed more engagement overall - for both misinformation and not. The "Far Left" category shows proportionally more engagement with misinformation than the "Slightly Left" or "Center" categories, but proportionally less than the "Slightly Right" or "Far Right" categories.

How much you value that metric comes down to how much you trust their process for categorizing misinformation vs not. They appear to have categorized the legitimacy of information based purely on the source rather than the content, which immediately raises some red flags for me. Is everything from Fox News inherently misinformation? Ben Shapiro? OAN?

One must also consider that relatively low engagement from left-leaning content may also indicate that "Far Left" users tend to get their news from other sources, thus making the spread of "Far Left Misinformation" less viable on Facebook, although it still very clearly exists.

I followed up and spent some time on media bias fact check, i found it really informative to see the far-left falsehoods. GMO foods show up a lot in the pseudoscience category. Outside of those, most falsehoods tend to be exaggerated stats, e.g. 70% of black inmates are incarcerated for minor drug charges.

I doubt this meta analysis is done well enough to make a statement such as the title. Easily seems like a personal sentiment backed by some well picked numbers.

Look forward to all of the opinions based off this as if it were fact.

- What does far right mean?

- What does misinformation mean?

- Measuring engagement is much more involved than looking at comment totals

On another note, does anyone else find it laughable that a researcher thinks they can so easily categorise political affiliations to internet communities?

"HN is far right!"

Edit: This post is already getting nasty. I don't care if you're left or right, I'm ripping on academics and the current state of research.

The social sciences need to be reigned back in.

> this meta analysis is done

This wasn't a meta analysis.

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> - What does far right mean?

They obtained ratings from News Guard (https://www.newsguardtech.com/) and Media Bias Fact Check (https://mediabiasfactcheck.com). You can go to those sites to review their ratings to determine how well you think they do at rating sites: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/right, or https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/left.

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> - What does misinformation mean?

Again, that comes from NewsGuard and MediaBiasFactCheck, which you can investigate yourself.

> Finally, we rely on NewsGuard and Media Bias Fact Check as two independent resources that rank news sources by bias and reliability; we do not ourselves define which sites do or don’t traffic in dis- and misinformation, nor do we make judgments about political leanings

Admittedly, these two definitions defer the definition of misinformation to these other organizations, so that question is still validly raised. But they are pretty clear in the study what sources they rely on for those definitions.

If you disagree that philosophically we cannot label a news source with those labels at all, then that's fair (though I disagree). If you disagree with the particular data sources they've chosen to do the labeling that's fair. But if you think this paper isn't clear with what it means for something to be "far-right", or "disinformation", I disagree.

You can recurse on the methodologies to the various data providers, to see if you agree with them as well.

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> - Measuring engagement is much more involved than looking at comment totals

So noted, and they do more than looking at comment totals. They also note that there is more complexity

> From CrowdTangle, we collected data on how many users follow these pages, and how many likes, comments, or other interactions each of these pages’ public posts have garnered.

They explicitly note this as a limitation, and that they could do more comprehensive studies with more data, but that data is not publicly available

> Our findings are limited by the lack of data provided by Facebook, which makes public information about engagement — reactions, shares, and comments — but not impressions — how many people actually saw a piece of content, spent time reading it, and so on. Such information would help researchers better analyze why far-right content is more engaging.

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> On another note, does anyone else find it laughable that a researcher thinks they can so easily categorise political affiliations to internet communities?

They do not associate political affiliations to internet communities. They assign those sources to "news sources", not to "political communities".

----

> I'm ripping on academics and the current state of research. The social sciences need to be reigned back in.

I find you've done a poor job of it in this case, with critiques that don't well apply to this study (the best critiques are around the subjectivity of the labeling of sources, the worst are those that are simply not accurate to this study).

I haven't reviewed the study in detail, so I'm not prepared to say it is high quality, but the criticisms you've leveled at it seem largely inaccurate based on my review of the study.

https://medium.com/cybersecurity-for-democracy/far-right-new...

It's not meta analysis. Also, the effect size is rather large. What basis do you see for doubting how well the study was done?

The research is highly politicized, which is tip number one that it lacks merit.

This is not the first article about how far-right misinformation is flourishing online and it would not be difficult to find corroborating articles, which I invite you to try.

I'm sure you can also find plenty of articles about how the Earth is flat. I'm not really sure what point you're trying to make.

You genuinely thought I was suggesting articles of that caliber?

Time to post my favorite downvote farming comment!

What is "far right"? Is there "near right"? "middle-reach right"? 'Far right' is just a BS title used to 'adjust' the perception of people that anyone not left wing is crazy extremist nutjob.

The article provides examples and cites the source of their classifications.

"MARTIN: So when you talk about a far-right news source, do you feel comfortable giving us an example that we might recognize? I know what I certainly think of, but what are you thinking of?

EDELSON: So some of the top-performing far-right news sources in our data set were things like Newsmax, Breitbart - that kind of media source.

MARTIN: And you and your colleagues say that far-right content is the only partisan leaning in which misinformation actually drives more engagement. And there is no what you call misinformation penalty. Could you just talk a little bit more about that? So a misinformation penalty is what? Is that if you are demonstrated to be inaccurate or false, then what? People who are on the left side of the ledger would give you less credibility. Is that it?

EDELSON: So we can't say exactly why it's happening. But what we see is that for left-leaning sources, for center sources, and even slightly right, the sources that have a reputation for spreading misinformation just don't engage as well. There could be a variety of reasons for that. But certainly, the simplest explanation would be that users don't find them as credible and don't want to engage with them."

> Is there "near right"? "middle-reach right"?

It’s generally called Center-Right. Mitt Romney, John McCain would be good examples.

This is far right: a national newscaster agreeing with a guest that the Republican Party will pick an actual fascist in 10-20 years: https://twitter.com/bad_takes/status/1375251130586963968. This is exactly the type of content that gets shared on Facebook and spreads as the article describes.

Phew, for a second there I was worried both the right AND the left had lunatic conspiracy theorists. Relieved to find it's only one side and that the far-left, if it even exists at all, is both totally normal and not even on social media. Besides, I trust NPR, they're very objective like the rest of the media.

The far left exists and has its own conspiracy theories, but its conspiracy theories are not:

- the mainstream, institutionalized belief of one of the two parties in the US

- repeated by Fox News every day

- constantly disavowed by people on their side of the aisle (e.g. Kemp and Raffensperger in Georgia)

Both sides are not the same. We even have Facebook's internal research showing that cracking down on misinformation and hate speech would primarily impact the right (at which point execs stopped it from happening).

I already know that there's no point in approaching you with facts, but I do think there's value in challenging this fictitious worldview, where everyone is persecuting poor innocent authoritarian racists.

LOL. Just the other day, Elizabeth Warren, a US senator, pushed a conspiracy that Stacy Abrams won the Georgia gubernatorial election three years ago. This would've gotten anyone banned from Facebook or Twitter if it was a different "side." To the extent a Facebook crackdown would mostly impact the right, it's because the loony-left is now completely mainstream and doesn't need Facebook. The crazies on the right have basically Fox and that's it, yawn.

Feel free to look at Twitter's trending topics. Any topic, and I mean literally ANY topic of some political nature, if you click on it, will take you to nothing but people shitting on anything conservative while praising anything liberal. It's all it is.

There's no balance ANYWHERE. Everything has been weaponized.

Is this a result of influence from YouTube or a result of the relative popularity of the videos?

Yep. Every time I even Google/Youtube some right winger person I just get articles/videos from leftist sources. I want to hear their views and all I get are Jon Oliver clips.

I'm a super centrist. Anyone who is on the left has no clue of the censorship going on. I have to use Google-Fu to find anything of substance on the right.

I am super centrist also, and all it's done is make me angrier and angrier at the state of things. I guess it's pushing me more libertarian watching all this insanity. The craziest thing is that R's and D's have basically flipped entirely on most major issues over the last few decades.

Couldn't you just open Fox News, Breitbart, OANN, or any of the other easily available, popular right-wing sites? Or how about the National Review, Daily Caller, or WSJ Opinion section?

Please show us an example of one single search where you can't find an expected right-leaning perspective in the results.

On my first attempt I proved what I said above.

http://imgur.com/a/U2oHejz

I went to YouTube, typed "Tucker Carlson" and got a Jimmy Kimmel video as my first result.

I am genuinely curious if anyone can explain that.

I also had to scroll down 8 results before an actual Tucker Carlson video appeared.

I can't reproduce that result.

I just opened an incognito in Chrome and searched for Tucker Carlson[1]. Most of my results were from Fox News, almost all were from Carlson's show. John Oliver is 10 results down[2].

1. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=tucker+carlson

2. https://imgur.com/a/Iaj5V4s

I think it's due to location. When I VPN to the US I get your results, but from Canada I get the parent comment's results.

The article clearly states that there are far-left sources of misinformation, but they do not drive engagement.

Far right is a codeword for wrongthink. Is left-side misinformation a concept in the mind's of the authors? I wonder how they identify it.

The author does in fact identify that left and far-left (and center and right) misinformation exists, but does not drive engagement. A cursory glance at the article reveals this.

I think your parent is quite aware of the contents of the article, and is questioning their ontology just like one would question a Jesuit's conception of 'heresy'.

The left is significantly more clever on how they move the Overton Window - doing it primarily by picking the topics that are discussed.

For example - the new focus on anti-Asian crime as a wedge issue.

Can you go into detail? Also, which country are you referring to?

Both sides pick topics that are discussed. Have you seen the news about migrants and the 'Biden Border Crisis' as I've seen it called?

If you read the article, you just might find out!

full title:

Far-Right Misinformation Is Thriving On Facebook. A New Study Shows Just How Much

The submitter used the HTML doc title. That's legit for an HN submission.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

I use the bookmarklet to submit stories. I only change them if they don't fit the limit.

what i found curious is the HTML title seems to indicate FB is somehow dependent on "farright misinformation" for engagment, whereas the rendered title of the article seems to indicate that said misinformation is thriving on the platform.

relevant: https://twitter.com/facebookstop10

Divide and conquer.

"Far-right misinformation"

~ government-funded leftist "newspaper"

Side versus side, always.

Society engages, largely, in a series genetic fallacies, as a means of filtering information. If it instead dealt in facts, a lot of the problems it faced would be resolved.

There is no left or right. There are just people who choose to believe one information source or another, mostly based on team affiliation. Then, those people engage in fallacious arguments with people who identify as being on the other team.

Take away team affiliation and a "far-right" individual may, in fact, just be somebody who believes in free market Austrian school economics, rather than a "fascist racist who hates women" or worse.

Take away team affiliation and a "leftist communist" may just be somebody who believes that healthcare should be paid for by the government.

Take away the labels and you are left with a couple individuals who would probably be willing to debate the merits of their positions against each other.

Yet another example of how "both sides" are not in fact the same and should not be treated the same by these companies or the media. There's no equivalent on the left to the far-right media complex of Fox News, talk radio, and online sources like those in the article.