> 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.
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.