5 ms·

Far-Right Misinformation Drives Facebook Engagement

50 points by elorant 6y ago

black6 6y ago
Divide and conquer.
lsb 6y ago
Petition to change the URL (and any npr url) to text.npr.org: https://text.npr.org/2021/03/06/974394783/far-right-misinformation-is-thriving-on-facebook-a-new-study-shows-just-how-much https://text.npr.org/2021/03/06/974394783/far-right-misinfor...
- adamors 6y ago
  This is really nice
  - mszcz 6y ago
    Yes, it looks better, but (at least for me) it's missing the chart.
- rolph 6y ago
  we can send any petitions to hn@ycombinator.com it helps to include a subject and a link to the submission.
minikites 6y ago
Yet another example of how "both sides" are not in fact the same and should not be treated the same by these companies or the media. There's no equivalent on the left to the far-right media complex of Fox News, talk radio, and online sources like those in the article.
draw_down 6y ago
Far-left misinformation, not a problem.
CivBase 6y ago
Facebook has become increasingly popular with older people. Older people tend to be more conservative. People engage more with content which confirms their preexisting biases. Facebook prioritizes engagement above all else because their monetization model is engagement => ad views => revenue. The ad-funded social media giants all inevitably turn into echo chamber factories.
- Zelphyr 6y ago
  It doesn't seem to me the problem is with the demographic trend of Facebook users so much as Facebook executives, including and especially Mark Zuckerberg, willfully choosing to ignore the misinformation simply because doing so would negatively affect their bottom line.
  - CivBase 6y ago
    I don't think it's a demographic issue either. The problem isn't older people are more likely to be conservative. The problem is that engagement-driven social media platforms profit from being echo chamber factories. It happens to the left too, even on Facebook. Nobody is safe.
    - GLGirty 6y ago
      > It happens to the left too, even on Facebook The researchers said they sampled for this and did not find it was the case. Extreme leftist facebook feed may not be statistically likely, but if it exists screencaps please, i am morbidly curious what it looks like.
      - CivBase 6y ago
        I don't have a Facebook account so I cannot provide screencaps, but the article itself doesn't hide the fact that it exists. > Those sources were placed in one of five categories for partisanship — Far Right, Slightly Right, Center, Slightly Left, Far Left — using evaluations from Media Bias/Fact Check and NewsGuard. Each source was then evaluated on whether it had a history of spreading misinformation or conspiracy theories. This is followed by a chart which shows engagement for each category. It includes "Far Left Misinformation", which is unsurprisingly not zero. Conservative content showed more engagement overall - for both misinformation and not. The "Far Left" category shows proportionally more engagement with misinformation than the "Slightly Left" or "Center" categories, but proportionally less than the "Slightly Right" or "Far Right" categories. How much you value that metric comes down to how much you trust their process for categorizing misinformation vs not. They appear to have categorized the legitimacy of information based purely on the source rather than the content, which immediately raises some red flags for me. Is everything from Fox News inherently misinformation? Ben Shapiro? OAN? One must also consider that relatively low engagement from left-leaning content may also indicate that "Far Left" users tend to get their news from other sources, thus making the spread of "Far Left Misinformation" less viable on Facebook, although it still very clearly exists.
thomasfromcdnjs 6y ago
I doubt this meta analysis is done well enough to make a statement such as the title. Easily seems like a personal sentiment backed by some well picked numbers. Look forward to all of the opinions based off this as if it were fact. - What does far right mean? - What does misinformation mean? - Measuring engagement is much more involved than looking at comment totals On another note, does anyone else find it laughable that a researcher thinks they can so easily categorise political affiliations to internet communities? "HN is far right!" Edit: This post is already getting nasty. I don't care if you're left or right, I'm ripping on academics and the current state of research. The social sciences need to be reigned back in.
- minikites 6y ago
  This is not the first article about how far-right misinformation is flourishing online and it would not be difficult to find corroborating articles, which I invite you to try.
  - why_Mr_Anderson 6y ago
    Time to post my favorite downvote farming comment! What is "far right"? Is there "near right"? "middle-reach right"? 'Far right' is just a BS title used to 'adjust' the perception of people that anyone not left wing is crazy extremist nutjob.
    - minikites 6y ago
      This is far right: a national newscaster agreeing with a guest that the Republican Party will pick an actual fascist in 10-20 years: https://twitter.com/bad_takes/status/1375251130586963968 https://twitter.com/bad_takes/status/1375251130586963968. This is exactly the type of content that gets shared on Facebook and spreads as the article describes.
    - pacerwpg 6y ago
      The article provides examples and cites the source of their classifications. "MARTIN: So when you talk about a far-right news source, do you feel comfortable giving us an example that we might recognize? I know what I certainly think of, but what are you thinking of? EDELSON: So some of the top-performing far-right news sources in our data set were things like Newsmax, Breitbart - that kind of media source. MARTIN: And you and your colleagues say that far-right content is the only partisan leaning in which misinformation actually drives more engagement. And there is no what you call misinformation penalty. Could you just talk a little bit more about that? So a misinformation penalty is what? Is that if you are demonstrated to be inaccurate or false, then what? People who are on the left side of the ledger would give you less credibility. Is that it? EDELSON: So we can't say exactly why it's happening. But what we see is that for left-leaning sources, for center sources, and even slightly right, the sources that have a reputation for spreading misinformation just don't engage as well. There could be a variety of reasons for that. But certainly, the simplest explanation would be that users don't find them as credible and don't want to engage with them."
rolph 6y ago
full title: Far-Right Misinformation Is Thriving On Facebook. A New Study Shows Just How Much
- dang 6y ago
  The submitter used the HTML doc title. That's legit for an HN submission. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20html%20doc%20title&sort=byDate&type=story&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
  - rolph 6y ago
    what i found curious is the HTML title seems to indicate FB is somehow dependent on "farright misinformation" for engagment, whereas the rendered title of the article seems to indicate that said misinformation is thriving on the platform.
  - elorant 6y ago
    I use the bookmarklet to submit stories. I only change them if they don't fit the limit.
bedhead 6y ago
Phew, for a second there I was worried both the right AND the left had lunatic conspiracy theorists. Relieved to find it's only one side and that the far-left, if it even exists at all, is both totally normal and not even on social media. Besides, I trust NPR, they're very objective like the rest of the media.
- smt88 6y ago
  The far left exists and has its own conspiracy theories, but its conspiracy theories are not: - the mainstream, institutionalized belief of one of the two parties in the US - repeated by Fox News every day - constantly disavowed by people on their side of the aisle (e.g. Kemp and Raffensperger in Georgia) Both sides are not the same. We even have Facebook's internal research showing that cracking down on misinformation and hate speech would primarily impact the right (at which point execs stopped it from happening). I already know that there's no point in approaching you with facts, but I do think there's value in challenging this fictitious worldview, where everyone is persecuting poor innocent authoritarian racists.
  - bedhead 6y ago
    LOL. Just the other day, Elizabeth Warren, a US senator, pushed a conspiracy that Stacy Abrams won the Georgia gubernatorial election three years ago. This would've gotten anyone banned from Facebook or Twitter if it was a different "side." To the extent a Facebook crackdown would mostly impact the right, it's because the loony-left is now completely mainstream and doesn't need Facebook. The crazies on the right have basically Fox and that's it, yawn. Feel free to look at Twitter's trending topics. Any topic, and I mean literally ANY topic of some political nature, if you click on it, will take you to nothing but people shitting on anything conservative while praising anything liberal. It's all it is. There's no balance ANYWHERE. Everything has been weaponized.
    - thomasfromcdnjs 6y ago
      Yep. Every time I even Google/Youtube some right winger person I just get articles/videos from leftist sources. I want to hear their views and all I get are Jon Oliver clips. I'm a super centrist. Anyone who is on the left has no clue of the censorship going on. I have to use Google-Fu to find anything of substance on the right.
calkuta 6y ago
Far right is a codeword for wrongthink. Is left-side misinformation a concept in the mind's of the authors? I wonder how they identify it.
- benjohnson 6y ago
  The left is significantly more clever on how they move the Overton Window - doing it primarily by picking the topics that are discussed. For example - the new focus on anti-Asian crime as a wedge issue.
  - pacerwpg 6y ago
    Both sides pick topics that are discussed. Have you seen the news about migrants and the 'Biden Border Crisis' as I've seen it called?
  - austinjp 6y ago
    Can you go into detail? Also, which country are you referring to?
- pacerwpg 6y ago
  The author does in fact identify that left and far-left (and center and right) misinformation exists, but does not drive engagement. A cursory glance at the article reveals this.
  - valvar 6y ago
    I think your parent is quite aware of the contents of the article, and is questioning their ontology just like one would question a Jesuit's conception of 'heresy'.
- rideontime 6y ago
  If you read the article, you just might find out!
latenightcoding 6y ago
relevant: https://twitter.com/facebookstop10 https://twitter.com/facebookstop10
gonational 6y ago
"Far-right misinformation" ~ government-funded leftist "newspaper" Side versus side, always. Society engages, largely, in a series genetic fallacies, as a means of filtering information. If it instead dealt in facts, a lot of the problems it faced would be resolved. There is no left or right. There are just people who choose to believe one information source or another, mostly based on team affiliation. Then, those people engage in fallacious arguments with people who identify as being on the other team. Take away team affiliation and a "far-right" individual may, in fact, just be somebody who believes in free market Austrian school economics, rather than a "fascist racist who hates women" or worse. Take away team affiliation and a "leftist communist" may just be somebody who believes that healthcare should be paid for by the government. Take away the labels and you are left with a couple individuals who would probably be willing to debate the merits of their positions against each other.

50 points by elorant 6y ago

Divide and conquer.

lsb 6y ago

Petition to change the URL (and any npr url) to text.npr.org: https://text.npr.org/2021/03/06/974394783/far-right-misinformation-is-thriving-on-facebook-a-new-study-shows-just-how-much https://text.npr.org/2021/03/06/974394783/far-right-misinfor...

adamors 6y ago
This is really nice
- mszcz 6y ago
  Yes, it looks better, but (at least for me) it's missing the chart.
rolph 6y ago
we can send any petitions to hn@ycombinator.com it helps to include a subject and a link to the submission.

minikites 6y ago

Yet another example of how "both sides" are not in fact the same and should not be treated the same by these companies or the media. There's no equivalent on the left to the far-right media complex of Fox News, talk radio, and online sources like those in the article.

draw_down 6y ago

Far-left misinformation, not a problem.

CivBase 6y ago

Facebook has become increasingly popular with older people. Older people tend to be more conservative. People engage more with content which confirms their preexisting biases. Facebook prioritizes engagement above all else because their monetization model is engagement => ad views => revenue. The ad-funded social media giants all inevitably turn into echo chamber factories.

Zelphyr 6y ago
It doesn't seem to me the problem is with the demographic trend of Facebook users so much as Facebook executives, including and especially Mark Zuckerberg, willfully choosing to ignore the misinformation simply because doing so would negatively affect their bottom line.
- CivBase 6y ago
  I don't think it's a demographic issue either. The problem isn't older people are more likely to be conservative. The problem is that engagement-driven social media platforms profit from being echo chamber factories. It happens to the left too, even on Facebook. Nobody is safe.
  - GLGirty 6y ago
    > It happens to the left too, even on Facebook The researchers said they sampled for this and did not find it was the case. Extreme leftist facebook feed may not be statistically likely, but if it exists screencaps please, i am morbidly curious what it looks like.
    - CivBase 6y ago
      I don't have a Facebook account so I cannot provide screencaps, but the article itself doesn't hide the fact that it exists. > Those sources were placed in one of five categories for partisanship — Far Right, Slightly Right, Center, Slightly Left, Far Left — using evaluations from Media Bias/Fact Check and NewsGuard. Each source was then evaluated on whether it had a history of spreading misinformation or conspiracy theories. This is followed by a chart which shows engagement for each category. It includes "Far Left Misinformation", which is unsurprisingly not zero. Conservative content showed more engagement overall - for both misinformation and not. The "Far Left" category shows proportionally more engagement with misinformation than the "Slightly Left" or "Center" categories, but proportionally less than the "Slightly Right" or "Far Right" categories. How much you value that metric comes down to how much you trust their process for categorizing misinformation vs not. They appear to have categorized the legitimacy of information based purely on the source rather than the content, which immediately raises some red flags for me. Is everything from Fox News inherently misinformation? Ben Shapiro? OAN? One must also consider that relatively low engagement from left-leaning content may also indicate that "Far Left" users tend to get their news from other sources, thus making the spread of "Far Left Misinformation" less viable on Facebook, although it still very clearly exists.

thomasfromcdnjs 6y ago

I doubt this meta analysis is done well enough to make a statement such as the title. Easily seems like a personal sentiment backed by some well picked numbers. Look forward to all of the opinions based off this as if it were fact. - What does far right mean? - What does misinformation mean? - Measuring engagement is much more involved than looking at comment totals On another note, does anyone else find it laughable that a researcher thinks they can so easily categorise political affiliations to internet communities? "HN is far right!" Edit: This post is already getting nasty. I don't care if you're left or right, I'm ripping on academics and the current state of research. The social sciences need to be reigned back in.

minikites 6y ago
This is not the first article about how far-right misinformation is flourishing online and it would not be difficult to find corroborating articles, which I invite you to try.
- why_Mr_Anderson 6y ago
  Time to post my favorite downvote farming comment! What is "far right"? Is there "near right"? "middle-reach right"? 'Far right' is just a BS title used to 'adjust' the perception of people that anyone not left wing is crazy extremist nutjob.
  - minikites 6y ago
    This is far right: a national newscaster agreeing with a guest that the Republican Party will pick an actual fascist in 10-20 years: https://twitter.com/bad_takes/status/1375251130586963968 https://twitter.com/bad_takes/status/1375251130586963968. This is exactly the type of content that gets shared on Facebook and spreads as the article describes.
  - pacerwpg 6y ago
    The article provides examples and cites the source of their classifications. "MARTIN: So when you talk about a far-right news source, do you feel comfortable giving us an example that we might recognize? I know what I certainly think of, but what are you thinking of? EDELSON: So some of the top-performing far-right news sources in our data set were things like Newsmax, Breitbart - that kind of media source. MARTIN: And you and your colleagues say that far-right content is the only partisan leaning in which misinformation actually drives more engagement. And there is no what you call misinformation penalty. Could you just talk a little bit more about that? So a misinformation penalty is what? Is that if you are demonstrated to be inaccurate or false, then what? People who are on the left side of the ledger would give you less credibility. Is that it? EDELSON: So we can't say exactly why it's happening. But what we see is that for left-leaning sources, for center sources, and even slightly right, the sources that have a reputation for spreading misinformation just don't engage as well. There could be a variety of reasons for that. But certainly, the simplest explanation would be that users don't find them as credible and don't want to engage with them."

rolph 6y ago

full title: Far-Right Misinformation Is Thriving On Facebook. A New Study Shows Just How Much

dang 6y ago
The submitter used the HTML doc title. That's legit for an HN submission. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20html%20doc%20title&sort=byDate&type=story&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- rolph 6y ago
  what i found curious is the HTML title seems to indicate FB is somehow dependent on "farright misinformation" for engagment, whereas the rendered title of the article seems to indicate that said misinformation is thriving on the platform.
- elorant 6y ago
  I use the bookmarklet to submit stories. I only change them if they don't fit the limit.

bedhead 6y ago

Phew, for a second there I was worried both the right AND the left had lunatic conspiracy theorists. Relieved to find it's only one side and that the far-left, if it even exists at all, is both totally normal and not even on social media. Besides, I trust NPR, they're very objective like the rest of the media.

smt88 6y ago
The far left exists and has its own conspiracy theories, but its conspiracy theories are not: - the mainstream, institutionalized belief of one of the two parties in the US - repeated by Fox News every day - constantly disavowed by people on their side of the aisle (e.g. Kemp and Raffensperger in Georgia) Both sides are not the same. We even have Facebook's internal research showing that cracking down on misinformation and hate speech would primarily impact the right (at which point execs stopped it from happening). I already know that there's no point in approaching you with facts, but I do think there's value in challenging this fictitious worldview, where everyone is persecuting poor innocent authoritarian racists.
- bedhead 6y ago
  LOL. Just the other day, Elizabeth Warren, a US senator, pushed a conspiracy that Stacy Abrams won the Georgia gubernatorial election three years ago. This would've gotten anyone banned from Facebook or Twitter if it was a different "side." To the extent a Facebook crackdown would mostly impact the right, it's because the loony-left is now completely mainstream and doesn't need Facebook. The crazies on the right have basically Fox and that's it, yawn. Feel free to look at Twitter's trending topics. Any topic, and I mean literally ANY topic of some political nature, if you click on it, will take you to nothing but people shitting on anything conservative while praising anything liberal. It's all it is. There's no balance ANYWHERE. Everything has been weaponized.
  - thomasfromcdnjs 6y ago
    Yep. Every time I even Google/Youtube some right winger person I just get articles/videos from leftist sources. I want to hear their views and all I get are Jon Oliver clips. I'm a super centrist. Anyone who is on the left has no clue of the censorship going on. I have to use Google-Fu to find anything of substance on the right.

calkuta 6y ago

Far right is a codeword for wrongthink. Is left-side misinformation a concept in the mind's of the authors? I wonder how they identify it.

benjohnson 6y ago
The left is significantly more clever on how they move the Overton Window - doing it primarily by picking the topics that are discussed. For example - the new focus on anti-Asian crime as a wedge issue.
- pacerwpg 6y ago
  Both sides pick topics that are discussed. Have you seen the news about migrants and the 'Biden Border Crisis' as I've seen it called?
- austinjp 6y ago
  Can you go into detail? Also, which country are you referring to?
pacerwpg 6y ago
The author does in fact identify that left and far-left (and center and right) misinformation exists, but does not drive engagement. A cursory glance at the article reveals this.
- valvar 6y ago
  I think your parent is quite aware of the contents of the article, and is questioning their ontology just like one would question a Jesuit's conception of 'heresy'.
rideontime 6y ago
If you read the article, you just might find out!

latenightcoding 6y ago

relevant: https://twitter.com/facebookstop10 https://twitter.com/facebookstop10

gonational 6y ago

"Far-right misinformation" ~ government-funded leftist "newspaper" Side versus side, always. Society engages, largely, in a series genetic fallacies, as a means of filtering information. If it instead dealt in facts, a lot of the problems it faced would be resolved. There is no left or right. There are just people who choose to believe one information source or another, mostly based on team affiliation. Then, those people engage in fallacious arguments with people who identify as being on the other team. Take away team affiliation and a "far-right" individual may, in fact, just be somebody who believes in free market Austrian school economics, rather than a "fascist racist who hates women" or worse. Take away team affiliation and a "leftist communist" may just be somebody who believes that healthcare should be paid for by the government. Take away the labels and you are left with a couple individuals who would probably be willing to debate the merits of their positions against each other.