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Comment by kelukelugames | Hacker News Reader

A fake news site owner said conservatives are more likely than liberals to believe and spread fake news. In fact, he said fake news didn't take off with liberals at all. I want to verify this. How easy would it be too replicate this experiment?

Edit: Found some links. Couldn't find the original article though.

0. Republicans seem more susceptible to fake news than Democrats (but liberals, don’t feel too comfy yet)

http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/05/republicans-seem-more-susce...

1. Article that says both left and right visits his fake news site.

http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/article/2017/may/31/If-...

2. Democrats are falling for fake news about Russia

https://www.vox.com/world/2017/5/19/15561842/trump-russia-lo...

3. The rise of left-wing, anti-Trump fake news

http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-39592010

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I think that is going to be really difficult to discern with any accuracy. The different mindset of the two parties will likely lead to differences in the types of things that each will believe, but I don't believe that either group is immune to believing made up stories.

I have also found that the losing party tends to suffer from the wildest delusions. I'm not really sure why that is, but it is always sad to watch.

>I have also found that the losing party tends to suffer from the wildest delusions.

I would disagree with you on this statement. The far right is consumed by conspiracy theories (Seth Rich, Pizzagate etc) despite controlling all three branches of the Federal Govt.

Very hard to verify, but you could probably dig up some related data if you tried hard enough. Possibly things like fraud reports?

I was thinking of making my own sites to spread fake left and fake right news and tracking clicks.

> A fake news site owner said conservatives are more likely than liberals to believe and spread fake news. In fact...

Why would you believe what a "fake news" site operator tells you?

Smug "I am too smart to be fooled" liberalism, I'd guess, based on the fact this legitimate point is currently being downvoted.

I don't. It matches anecdotes at best. That's why I want to verify it.

That makes sense.

Ironically though, just as another anecdote (and to the best of my knowledge), the very first "fake news" right-wing site who's operator was confronted, ended up being a left-voting liberal who [paraphrasing] "hated conservatives and people on the right, and wanted to spread disinformation to them to pollute their arguments".

But I guess we'll never know, so the best solution is still non-censorship.

It's being down voted because it's an accusatory, non-answer to a speculative statement. The parent comment literally stated "I want to verify this." It's not a legitimate point in any sense of the word legitimate.

I'd have myself a hard think about what lead you to writing such a comment up.

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