| I think you are being terribly naive, sorry. From the study you just linked to: > Posts containing links to external websites are cross-referenced against lists of fake news publishers built by journalists and academics Have you seen opinion polls of these two professions? They are overwhelmingly, and I mean more than 90% left-voting. Conservative academics have published a long list of stories about how they have been made unwelcome or pushed out. There are virtually no conservatives in academic or journalist circles these days. So all your study shows is that if you ask a bunch of Democrats to make a list of "fake news" sites, they list out a lot of pro-Trump conservative outlets. What a shock. Anyone could have told you that - this isn't science and doesn't deserve a paper, it's just bog standard political mud-flinging posing as science. This is the exact sort of behaviour that's driving a wedge between people: biased academics use the vague aura and automatic defence to science that they've inherited from prior generations to make absurd claims. Journalists who came straight from college and who retain an automatic deference to professors repeat whatever they say as "findings", conservatives who double check discover scientific fraud and call it out, then liberals go in for the double smear of claiming their opponents are anti-intellectual! Speaking now as a foreigner watching from abroad, over the last few years I've watched as what looked like the entire American left descended down a crazy conspiracy theory of Trump being a Russian spy or collaborator. We now know that isn't true. How many millions or billions of Facebook posts must have been shared about the whole Mueller investigation, about the idea that Trump and Russia are connected in some way? And yet it's all false, it was a fiction invented by the media to get clicks and ratings. Stories collapsed left and right, even left-leaning journalists like Greenwald and Taibbi have since come out flaming the journalistic establishment because so many of the stories turned out to be false, and yet the left seem to collectively fall for it in a huge way. So I am very skeptical about your thesis that there's a big difference in people's susceptibility to fake news, or how intellectual they are. You should be especially self reflective give you just cited a supposedly scientific study that makes extraordinary claims about voter intelligence yet is transparently nonsense - it's literally "we asked a bunch of Democrats to pick websites they disagree with, labelled them as fake news, and discovered Trump supporters share lots of fake news". You should learn from the conservatives and trust academia a bit less! |