Capital Curmudgeon
Every once in a while, scientific researchers will labor long and hard to clinically demonstrate what we could pretty much find out for ourselves by just looking around.
Still, it’s nice to have real data to back up what we already gleaned from naked-eye observation.
Researchers at New York University and a French institution, the Universite’ Grenoble Alpes, analyzed Facebook between August of last year and January — approximately from the presidential campaigns to the Biden inauguration. They found that unreliable news sources got six times as many likes, shares and other interactions as information from trusted agencies like the World Health Organization or big TV news networks.
We all have our own ideas about which sites are on the looney left or ridiculous right, but the Washington Post last week cited Occupy Democrats and Breitbart as examples of extremes. The researchers said that misinformation was more common on the right edge of the political spectrum, but that finding could be tainted by the presumed liberalism of academia. You’d expect NYU to be shocked by bias on the right and, naturally, whether you trust CNN or the WHO is a judgment call, too.
But the math — six times as many shares and likes — is alarming when you consider that many people so much information from the internet. No wonder so many people think the government is trying to control us with mask mandates, or that violent thugs rioting at the U.S. Capitol were really patriots, or...
Read Full Story: https://www.tallahassee.com/story/opinion/2021/09/13/fake-news-flourishes-social-media-bill-cotterell-opinion-capitol/8273745002/
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