Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
throwaway817472 | on: Trump wins presidency for second time
Who is defining what is misinformation? It would be easy to reframe such that the opposite can be just as “true, “ depending on your perspective. For example: Trump turned out not to be working with Russia, despite the media and politicians constantly saying they had evidence. Trump started zero wars, despite fear mongering that he would start World War 3. He ended the tensions with North Korea, despite pundits saying diplomacy doesn’t work with dictators. Arguably all of that was misinformation, so one could argue the opposite of what you said is also true. Whomever defines “misinformation” can make that statement with full confidence and be correct in their own mind every time.
intended | parent | next
This is my domain of work, so - Me. If that’s not good enough you can look at the research paper I linked.

If you haven’t looked at the article - this is directly in the summary:

> sers who were pro-Trump/conservative also shared far more links to various sets of low-quality news sites—even when news quality was determined by politically balanced groups of laypeople, or groups of only Republican laypeople—and had higher estimated likelihoods of being bots

If you want more - The original fake news, the Romanian ad farm sites, had greater success and traction when they targeted conservative viewers.

To save us both trouble - this is not some cockamamie argument about crud like “he who defines it can be correct.”,or conflation of bad reporting and hyperbole.

This is straight up conservatives being the victims and consistent targets of mis and disinformation.

I also know that this will have 0 impact on changing minds. I know it wont.

That said, I do hope we can agree that people deserve respect for their efforts to understand a topic, subject or field of work. Do read the article, and when I say that conservative / republican information diets are more vulnerable and exposed to low quality information and conspiracy theories, I’d appreciate the honor of at least having your opinion on the abstract and matter of the paper.

loading story #42073227
throwaway817472 | root | parent
I don’t disagree with your points, as they tend to align with my personal experience. Given that most of the people I interact with are conservative, I can’t really compare to the sources used by progressives, but I suspect it would consist more of links to mainstream media. Jumping on a plane, so won’t be able to respond quickly, but I will read the article you linked.

My point wasn’t necessarily that conservatives aren’t exposed to more misinformation, but rather that misinformation is very difficult to define, since the general public lacks so much information. Very few people actually know the truth. Many people fill in the gaps with their biases and then believe they’ve consumed “the truth.” Without an objective view of all facts, it’s difficult to ascertain the truth, therefore it’s also difficult to ascertain what is misinformation.

intended | root | parent
Thank you, I will come back and engage with your response.
throwaway817472 | root | parent
My apologies for writing my response in a piecemeal fashion as I read through the paper. I’m on a phone, which makes it difficult for me to take proper notes and to write a response of proper length.

My initial reaction is that this study seems to delegate the classification of misinformation to a set of fact checkers and journalists. It then uses this to classify links as being either misinformation or disinformation, based on a trustworthiness score. Unfortunately, I can’t open the table of exact fact checkers and journalists because none of the links work on my mobile browser, so I’ll have to just guess at the contents for now.

Delegating classification of truth to these third parties allows for significant bias in the results. Most conservatives consider main stream media and fact checkers to have a significant progressive bias. If correct, this would explain at least some of the results of this study. I haven’t done a thorough analysis myself, so I can’t say either way, but it would be worth investigating.

The study also mentions that many users could have been bots. I suspect this could also have skewed the results. This is mentioned in the abstract, so I suspect it’s addressed later in the paper.

Either way, continuing to read… very interesting study.

intended | root | parent
Take your time, please.

As for your objection and concern - the study deals with that issue by letting participants decide themselves, what counts as high quality and low quality.

This holds if you look at outright conspiracy theories. Globally, conservative users are the most susceptible to such campaigns.

I will add "at this moment in time". I expect that sufficiently virulent disinfo which targets the left will evolve eventually.

For additional reading, not directly related to lib / con disinfo efficacy - The spreading of misinformation online. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1517441113

This is one of the first papers on this topic I ever read, and will help in the consideration of misinfo / disinfo traffic patterns in a network.

uhh - not that you asked for additional reading.