Misinformation on Facebook got 6x more clicks than factual news during election | Hacker News Reader

Misinformation on Facebook got 6x more clicks than factual news during election

washingtonpost.com

26 pointshoppyhoppy224 comments

While the article is easy to believe, I'd prefer it was phrased more precisely. For example:

> news publishers known for putting out misinformation got six times the amount of likes, shares, and interactions on the platform as did trustworthy news sources

If a publisher is known for putting out misinformation (and what is the threshold?), that does not mean all their stories are false. To make the claim in the title, the shared articles would have to be individually evaluated for truthfulness.

The second thing that stuck out to me (emphasis mine):

> The researchers also found that the statistically significant misinformation boost is politically neutral — misinformation-trafficking pages on both the far left and the far right generated much more engagement from Facebook users than factual pages of any political slant. But publishers on the right have a much higher propensity to share misleading information than publishers in other political categories, the study found.

The paragraph switches from talking about misinformation (which I understand to be information that is false), to misleading information, which is a far more vague categorization. Notably, any kind of disfavored statistic, that is grudgingly conceded to be factual, tends to be called "misleading", either for failing to adjust for enough factors, or for implying some cause or conspiracy, or for measuring something you shouldn't care about in the first place.

Even though I know it is the case it never fails to shock me how naive and unquestioning people are when they read something. It’s like they feel the act of them reading it makes it likely to be true.

If people then question or doubt it when the person just repeats it they get angry when it’s they that should have done that

We all want to be privy to knowledge that is not widely known, even hidden. It should come as no surprise that info that carries an air of "you're not going to see this on the mainstream!" will have an appeal. Heck, that's why I read HN first thing in the morning is because I'm going to see new here long before it shows up elsewhere, along with links to stories/tech you're just not going to find anywhere else. If Facebook it making people believe they have the Forbidden Fruit there's going to be a line of people demanding to have a bite.

This reminds me of the Gladiator movie scene after the first death in the colosseum “Are you not entertained!!”

The grotesque disinformation internet is a mirror of our humanity.

I gravitate toward news articles with meaningful citation hyperlink(s) and not links that points to just its definition, or worse points to similarly but not related articles within their own web site.

So basically facebook is saying it's bo biggie that people mostly click & watch disinformation because they do scroll past a lot more memes ...

https://archive.is/6lAq3

“misinformation”

As defined by the ministry of truth, I presume.

Seems like misinformation pays

Isn't it already common knowledge that Right leaning readers are moving away from mainstream left wing leaning news sources. The rise of Brietbart, and similar sites that fact checkers dislike is hardly a surprise is it not? (Or is it? seriously, I would like to know, are people surprised that right wing sources are increasing in the wake of Trump?)

The surprising part is the extent to which right wing news like what comes out of Murdoch's companies has become a vehicle for dissemination of obvious falsehoods --paranoid nonsense inconsistent with any evidence. Long ago, I used to think right wing politics were fundamentally rational and just carried a different view on how best to govern versus the left's. Nowadays I see little appeal to rationality, and a great deal of trust-destroying, desperately contrarian fiction masquerading as insight. Left wing sources have gotten worse, too, but don't seem as keen on making things up.

examples?

An easy example is the idea that the 2020 US presidential election was stolen. There's Obama birtherism, the Seth Rich thing, attributing all sorts of nonsense to Antifa. Coverage of COVID has been awful and very misleading from the start.

i don’t think you can conclusively say there wasn’t something fishy about the 2020 election. the 2016 election was considered “stolen” or “hacked” by the losing party that year too

I think every election is going to be fishy in the sense that the biased media outlets break stories in ways to manipulate voters towards one outcome or the other. Making voting more accessible to people with mail-in ballots will have had some affect, too, and most likely helped the democrats, just like closing polling stations and under-serving voters has helped the republicans in some cases. But was it cheating, or stealing? I don't think that qualifies at all. I definitely don't think the pandemic response and mail-in ballot measures were primarily some scheme to get more D votes. I wouldn't call Trumps 2016 win illegitimate either, but all the fake news coming from russian owned blogs and sockpuppets and targeting vulnerable voters was still something we needed to make a stink about and work to mitigate.

If there was something fishy there would be evidence wouldn’t there? The DOJ said there was no rampant voter fraud. Every election will have some votes that are off, but when it’s not enough to sway the election (by even a close margin) then I don’t think it rises to the bar of suspicious. In 2016 there was not any coverage about the election being stolen, nor people attacking congress to try and overturn an election. There was a large discussion about polling and how they were so off. Also outrage about how the electoral college works (same thing in 2020). Maybe if you look at the media on the extreme sides you have a different picture, but I would say the sentiment after 2016 was more shock (once again because of polling).

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