Fake news is fooling more conservatives than liberals. Why? | Hacker News Reader

Fake news is fooling more conservatives than liberals. Why?

economist.com

18 pointsedward17 comments

To look at it another way: maybe it’s not fooling, but knowingly aiding In their point of view, true or not.

Article is paywalled. Outline link: https://outline.com/pc7NqB

I've never heard of outline before. Would you mind explaining how it works?

It's essentially 'Reader Mode', except as a website rather than as a browser feature.

You give Outline a URL, and it gives you back a URL of its 'purified' copy of the page's contents, stripped of spam and bloat. In this instance, it seems to have had no trouble with the paywall.

"Last month a poll by YouGov found that 44% of Republicans think Bill Gates wants to use covid-19 vaccines to implant microchips in people; 19% of Democrats agree."

That number, for both parties, was much higher than I would've guessed.

Based on both numbers I'd have to say this is completely made up. There's no possible way this is real. I've seen those "Bill gates as the elder of zion" memes circulated around once or twice but the people who did share those are the same people who share healing crystal and astrology memes, and they're not 20% of the population.

I would have to agree. Unless they only interviewed the people who saw a targeted campaign of just that fake info, and then asked how many of them believed it. But broadly there's no way that's an accurate percentage

I heard this from a real life human being recently, was quite the shock. They then keep saying things like "Coronavirus is just a flu"

Checking the source - it was a Yahoo poll.

Not to be rude to people that use Yahoo, but my impressions is that you'd need to poll from other sources to find a representative example of your typical American.

Do smart people tend to be more liberal? https://theconversation.com/do-smart-people-tend-to-be-more-...

Sadly, the answer is yes.

Quoting from the article: "On the available evidence, the presence of people subscribing to economic liberalism within the ostensibly conservative parties in the US, UK and Australia makes it very unlikely that a substantial correlation – either positive or negative – will be found between political conservatism and intelligence."

So the answer seems to be no?

This is a well known thing inside facebook fake news teams

Reply on news.ycombinator.com