[marketneutral]

Your statement is false and unsourced. The basis of the paper, as stated in the abstract is to "examine the role of search engines and their optimization processes in directing traffic towards junk news & disinformation about COVID-19" - it has nothing to do with "radical leftist propaganda".

Also, besides Snopes, the authors list the following sources: AFP Factuel, BBC Reality Check, Correctiv, Les Décodeurs, dpa Faktencheck, FactCheck, Media Bias/Fact Check, Newsguard, Pagella Politica, PolitiFact, Tagesschau Faktenfinder.

It is easy, especially for the HN community, to see that overly-sensationalist fake news stories could trip an algo whose purpose is to surface the "most popular" stories.

This is fantastic work by The Computational Propaganda Project.

[jbdigriz]

The very first line of the introduction has most blatant heavy handed QUALITATIVE assessment of ZeroHedge as an example of a conspiratorial site which is as antithetical to true science as you can get. In fact, the term conspiracy theory was itself developed by the CIA to discredit any leaks about various clandestine activities they intended to keep this way. This is a bad faith argument and sets the stage for everything to come, culminating in the true intention which is to continue the marxist left on free thought and speech.

Every single one of those "fact checker" sites is a known left leaning and supported entity with plenty of examples of mistruth.

It's ironic how both the left and right are at least pretending to want to reign in big tech, but for the exact opposite reasons...