> The authors found that supersharers were disproportionately Republican, middle-aged White women residing in three conservative states, Arizona, Florida, and Texas
But where do the supersharers of true news live? California and San Francisco I guess...
> The authors found that supersharers were disproportionately Republican, middle-aged White women residing in three conservative states, Arizona, Florida, and Texas
You can get a fairly clean timeline on X by just cleaning up followers, using the Not interested in post, and not re-posting or re-sharing anything sensational.
I have been curating STEM related teaching feed, and I have had great results with this technique.
I've clicked Not Interested on Elon's posts dozens of times. Same with right wing loons like Rudy Giuliani and the My Pillow guy. They keep showing up. It almost seems intentional.
The algorithm was changes to show more right-wing posts and more Elon Musk posts. This is widely documented. Try opening up a new account to see how bad it is. Not sure why anyone uses it instead of Mastodon, Threads or Bluesky
> Similar to prior work, we rely on a source-level definition of fake news as domains that portray as legitimate news outlets but do not have the “editorial norms and processes for ensuring the accuracy and credibility of information.” We rely on the manually labeled list of fake news sites by Grinberg et al., updated using NewsGuard ratings, and demonstrate the robustness of the findings to different operationalizations.
They don't define fake news as news that is wrong or intentionally deceptive, but by a blacklist of outlets they define as fake news outlets, or rather have been defined that way by a weird company.
> NewsGuard approved sites include The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and BuzzFeed. Sites labeled as unreliable include InfoWars, the Daily Kos, Sputnik, RT, WikiLeaks, and Fox News. NewsGuard's founders cautioned that its "Nutrition Label" should not be treated as an endorsement equivalent to the nutrition facts label from the Food and Drug Administration.
> Sites that had previously ignored the extension, such as MailOnline, objected to being listed as unreliable. The decision to list MailOnline as unreliable was reversed, and NewsGuard admitted they were wrong on some counts.
edit: i.e. they've used "science" to detect that upper-middle aged women share a lot of articles on social media (we used to refer to them as aunts), and that people in Arizona, Florida, and Texas are conservative.
It all depends on what you define as "fake news" doesn't it? How about in that same time frame "51 Intelligence Experts Say Hunter's Laptop is Russian Disinformation" or "Trump will release an untested vaccine to boost his election chances," were those factored into the study? I kinda suspect they weren't.
They weren't, but the laptop having nothing to do with the Russians would have been counted as fake news because it was published mostly in outlets that the company Newsguard declared as fake news outlets (at least up to 2020.)
> NewsGuard is based in New York City. Its advisors include former officials such as Tom Ridge, former homeland security secretary, Richard Stengel, former undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, Michael Hayden, former CIA director general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, former NATO chief, as well as Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.
Ironic the media spent years debunking his laptop as disinformation and now its being used in his gun case as evidence of his crimes.
So much for having “all the hallmarks” of Russian disinformation. So much for “it could be that I was hacked.”
Almost four full years after Big Tech suppressed The Post’s bombshell reporting on Hunter Biden’s abandoned “laptop from hell” with its evidence of influence-peddling, drug use, and other lurid activity, the device will take center stage in the first son’s federal trial on gun charges next month.
Special counsel David Weiss’ team made clear that it intends to use data from the notorious hard drive as evidence against the now-54-year-old.
I wonder how people would feel if the races were reversed:
"The authors found that supersharers were disproportionately Democrat, middle-aged Black women residing in three liberal states, California, New York, and Minnesota, which are focus points of contentious anti-policing and gun control battles."
People would probably feel confused, because that "reversal" doesn't reflect reality, and they would also probably wonder what you feel that proves, if anything.
“How would people feel if reality was other than it is?”
I mean, this seems like a slightly pointless question. Like maybe as a premise for a horribly tedious alternate history novel, but otherwise I fail to see the point.
You most likely would not have read about the study if that were the outcome because it would have been remained unpublished due to self-censorship or buried.
It would be an interesting experiment indeed. Getting that result isn't hard, that's just a matter of finding the right researchers to do the study just like any other study in this field (including this one). Academia being what it is is will be harder to find the 'right' candidate but that does not make it impossible.
The whole concept of 'fake news' is fraught with error anyway given that it wholly depends on who gets to decide what is 'fake news'. Were and are the many claims that 'we only have X years left' fake news, especially where X has come and gone without the world succumbing to whatever was supposed to ail it? What about all those calls that 'politician Y will become a dictator' which turned out to be untrue, was that fake news? What does that say about similar calls being made about the same person at a later point in time, can those now be labelled 'fake news'?
Fake news and the related 'fact checkers' are just weapons in the arsenal of the propagandists in the battle with other propagandists. In the end it is propaganda all the way down.
> Republican, middle-aged White women residing in three conservative states, Arizona, Florida, and Texas, which are focus points of contentious abortion and immigration battles. Their neighborhoods were poorly educated but relatively high in income. Supersharers’ massive volume did not seem automated but was rather generated through manual and persistent retweeting.
This kind of people existed for a long time. Before social media, I attended university with a few women who preached religious conservative ideals. The stories were so "off" that the campus chaplains pointed out that the stories (now called fake news) weren't charitable.
After graduation, they worked minimum-paid jobs for a few years, married, became homemakers and have 5+ children. They were super active on social media, so I thought, "Why do you have so much time on hand?" In addition, living in the conservative states must be so cheap or they were so wealthy that there's only one breadwinner in the household.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 67.2 ms ] threadBut where do the supersharers of true news live? California and San Francisco I guess...
Unstoppable force there
I have been curating STEM related teaching feed, and I have had great results with this technique.
This primes the algorithm to show more of that type of content.
They don't define fake news as news that is wrong or intentionally deceptive, but by a blacklist of outlets they define as fake news outlets, or rather have been defined that way by a weird company.
> NewsGuard approved sites include The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and BuzzFeed. Sites labeled as unreliable include InfoWars, the Daily Kos, Sputnik, RT, WikiLeaks, and Fox News. NewsGuard's founders cautioned that its "Nutrition Label" should not be treated as an endorsement equivalent to the nutrition facts label from the Food and Drug Administration.
> Sites that had previously ignored the extension, such as MailOnline, objected to being listed as unreliable. The decision to list MailOnline as unreliable was reversed, and NewsGuard admitted they were wrong on some counts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NewsGuard
edit: i.e. they've used "science" to detect that upper-middle aged women share a lot of articles on social media (we used to refer to them as aunts), and that people in Arizona, Florida, and Texas are conservative.
> NewsGuard is based in New York City. Its advisors include former officials such as Tom Ridge, former homeland security secretary, Richard Stengel, former undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, Michael Hayden, former CIA director general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, former NATO chief, as well as Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NewsGuard
So much for having “all the hallmarks” of Russian disinformation. So much for “it could be that I was hacked.”
Almost four full years after Big Tech suppressed The Post’s bombshell reporting on Hunter Biden’s abandoned “laptop from hell” with its evidence of influence-peddling, drug use, and other lurid activity, the device will take center stage in the first son’s federal trial on gun charges next month.
Special counsel David Weiss’ team made clear that it intends to use data from the notorious hard drive as evidence against the now-54-year-old.
https://nypost.com/2024/05/22/us-news/hunter-bidens-infamous...
"The authors found that supersharers were disproportionately Democrat, middle-aged Black women residing in three liberal states, California, New York, and Minnesota, which are focus points of contentious anti-policing and gun control battles."
I mean, this seems like a slightly pointless question. Like maybe as a premise for a horribly tedious alternate history novel, but otherwise I fail to see the point.
It would be an interesting experiment indeed. Getting that result isn't hard, that's just a matter of finding the right researchers to do the study just like any other study in this field (including this one). Academia being what it is is will be harder to find the 'right' candidate but that does not make it impossible.
The whole concept of 'fake news' is fraught with error anyway given that it wholly depends on who gets to decide what is 'fake news'. Were and are the many claims that 'we only have X years left' fake news, especially where X has come and gone without the world succumbing to whatever was supposed to ail it? What about all those calls that 'politician Y will become a dictator' which turned out to be untrue, was that fake news? What does that say about similar calls being made about the same person at a later point in time, can those now be labelled 'fake news'?
Fake news and the related 'fact checkers' are just weapons in the arsenal of the propagandists in the battle with other propagandists. In the end it is propaganda all the way down.
things get suppressed here so easily
It could happen to anyone,[0] but there are a group of flag-happy folks here with a particular political leaning, and they outnumber the rest of us.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostrich_effect#Neuroscientific...
This kind of people existed for a long time. Before social media, I attended university with a few women who preached religious conservative ideals. The stories were so "off" that the campus chaplains pointed out that the stories (now called fake news) weren't charitable.
After graduation, they worked minimum-paid jobs for a few years, married, became homemakers and have 5+ children. They were super active on social media, so I thought, "Why do you have so much time on hand?" In addition, living in the conservative states must be so cheap or they were so wealthy that there's only one breadwinner in the household.
We aren't in touch anymore.
Facebook outages must be hard on them.