The claim of the study is that they can investigate prevalence of fake news sharing of different groups, so the concerns is more expansive than that and puts th

The claim of the study is that they can investigate prevalence of fake news sharing of different groups, so the concerns is more expansive than that and puts the scientific validity of their conclusions on dubious grounds. There are four questions that need to be answered: 1) are the classifications complete over the data set in the study, not an arbitrary different data set 2) is the populations studied representative of the populuation in general 3) are the classifications unbiased 4) are the classification structure sufficiently granular to represent uncertainty On #1 they did their study on a three-month segments beginning 9 months from election day, while the study by YouGov is over a different set of voluntary users in a different time period. On #2 the population was chosen by voluntary particiation and I don't see any mention of them doing necessary statistical analysis to make sure it is representative of the general population. On #3 and #4 buzzfeed said they collected the classifications by searching for fake news of interest to people of their ideological tilt. Some of which is admittedly not fake news, such as hillarys mishandling of government emails: -- BuzzFeed News used the content analysis tool BuzzSumo, which enables users to search for content by keyword, URL, time range, and social share counts. BuzzFeed News searched in BuzzSumo using keywords such as "Hillary Clinton" and "Donald Trump," as well as combinations such as "Trump and election" or "Clinton and emails" to see the top stories about these topics according to Facebook engagement. We also searched for known viral lies such as "Soros and voting machine." and -- Two of the biggest false hits were a story claiming Clinton sold weapons to ISIS and a hoax claiming the pope endorsed Trump, which the site removed after publication of this article. The only viral false stories during the final three months that were arguably against Trump's interests were a false quote from Mike Pence about Michelle Obama, a false report that Ireland was accepting American "refugees" fleeing Trump, and a hoax claiming RuPaul said he was groped by Trump. I am sure many other problems could be found if I looked more, but just one of these would put a nail in the coffin of their conclusion and together they just put it on dubious grounds. [1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/viral-fake-election-news-outperformed-real-news-on-facebook https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/viral-fa...