[intended]

The OP is correct though. If the issue is that their statement is weak when its being reduced to just Fox News subscribers, then sure.

However the issue is about the kind of information ecosystems that drive polarization and misinformation.

Disinfo and misinformation campaigns target right wing / conservative viewers more than they do left wing / liberals.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07942-8

But I can point to research and articles till the cows come home. The fact is that people reject everything negative about Trump and fill in the blanks with whatever they want to believe.

We’re basically playing whose line is it anyway

[throwaway817472]

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]

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.

[throwaway817472]

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]

Thank you, I will come back and engage with your response.

[throwaway817472]

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]

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.

[nixdev]

The "fine people" and "drinking bleach" hoaxes objectively showed us what side of yesterday's election is for the large part egregiously gullible.

[shadowgovt]

Less hoaxes and more the least-charitable interpretation of what he said. It's easy to find the exact quotes, in video, with context---different people disagree on what those statements from him mean.

Trump tends to talk in word-salad. It makes it very possible for two reasonable individuals to reach different conclusions about what was communicated.

[nixdev]

The "fine people" hoax and "drink bleach" hoax are not open to interpretation, not by a long shot.

Even Snopes, fucking Snopes, confirmed the "fine people" thing is false.

Obama, Kamala, and Joe Biden all pushed "Trump said Nazis were fine people" with complete confidence, this is the literal definition of a hoax.

The original video credited with "drinking bleach", was Trump openly speculating on disinfection approaches. And, the approach he verbalized out loud, disinfecting lungs with UV light, was at the time a relatively new and completely valid medical treatment. Trump was ahead of the curve on that one.

Anyone who interprets his open questions about the UV light treatment as "drink bleach" is either a victim of a hoax (and an irresponsible moron) or has no qualms pushing hoaxes.

[Jerrrrrrry]

Also, his remarks during the Jan6th meandering are indiscernable from MLK's or others, but had the "violent" (no broken statues, no fires, no fatalities...?) "insurrection" been any less "welcomed", then his plagiarism would had likely been spotlighted instead.

[shadowgovt]

The Snopes article you reference (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-very-fine-people/) contains in itself a clarification from the editor, to whit:

""" Editors' Note: Some readers have raised the objection that this fact check appears to assume Trump was correct in stating that there were "very fine people on both sides" of the Charlottesville incident. That is not the case. This fact check aimed to confirm what Trump actually said, not whether what he said was true or false. For the record, virtually every source that covered the Unite the Right debacle concluded that it was conceived of, led by and attended by white supremacists, and that therefore Trump's characterization was wrong. """

Given that the Unite the Right rally was organized by overt white supremacists, white-supremacist-adjacent organizations, and people comfortable with rallying with those groups, it is an understandable inference a person could draw that when Trump claims a set of people is "fine people" and the set is as above described, there is no daylight between what he said and a claim that white supremacists are "fine people" (because excluding the people he overtly says he isn't talking about leaves the empty set... i.e. he either meant to say Nazis were fine people or he made a statement that is a logical contradiction, so if one's benefit of the doubt comes down on the side of "he isn't a befuddled man who contradicts himself with three sentences," one assumes the non-illogical statement supporting Nazis as fine people).

This train of thought is predicated upon how much one buys into the old saw that "everyone sitting comfortably at a table with one Nazi is called Nazis." But if you wish to understand the train of thought that leads to an alternate interpretation of his words, that is the train of thought.

(Similar logic applies to the "drink bleach" comment. He didn't literally suggest people drink bleach. In addition to his comments on UV therapy, he also opined on how effective bleach is as a cleansing agent and whether it would be possible to somehow apply it inside the human body... Which anyone who knows basic chemistry knows is mad. He just says things, which are open to being interpreted in the worst possible light.)

With respect, you seem to be trying to tell people that words aren't open to interpretation when they do not share your interpretation of the literal words they heard, and that's probably a non-starter argument. It is probably not an optimal way to "converse curiously."