FAKE NEWS FAKE OUT!

[Mystic Wanderer]

This is a rather old thread, but the Fake News I'm about to post still fits, so...  

The article is rather long, so I'm only sharing some of it.  Read the whole story here:

The Oxford Study Saying Trump Supporters Share More Fake News Is Fake News

Oxford University / Getty Images

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BY: [url=http://freebeacon.com/author/elizabeth-harrington/]Elizabeth Harrington Follow @LizWFB
February 9, 2018 5:00 am
An Oxford University study being spread by mainstream news outlets that claims Trump supporters share the most fake news is itself fake news.
Researchers at the Computational Propaganda Project, who are the recipients of over $200,000 in taxpayer funding, spent "several years" developing its "junk news" list, which is actually full of the most popular conservative websites on the internet.

Websites included on the researchers' "watch list" of propaganda news outlets includes the Washington Free Beacon, the Daily Caller, National Review, and the Drudge Report, which is the seventh most highly visited media publication in the United States.
Contrary to the claim that conservatives are sharing the most fake news, the study proves nothing other than finding conservatives tend to share conservative media online.

Philip N. Howard, Vidya Narayanan, Bence Kollanyi, and Lisa-Maria Neudert of Oxford University wrote the six-page study, along with Vlad Barash and John Kelly who work for Graphika, a social media startup that "provides the context needed to make strategic business decisions."
Oxford publicized its results Tuesday with a provocative press release that declared, "Trump supporters and extreme right ‘share widest range of junk news.'"

The sweeping claim that Trump supporters circulate more fake news than "all other political audience groups combined" was based on analysis of three months of tweets.

"We find that the political landscape is strikingly divided across ideological lines when it comes to who is sharing junk news," said Neudert. "We find that Trump supporters, hard conservatives and right-wing groups are circulating more junk news than other groups."

The purpose of Oxford's Computational Propaganda Project is to analyze how social media can be used to "manipulate public opinion."
Media outlets seized on the study. The Huffington Post reported, "Trump supporters consume and share the most fake news." "Fake news sharing in US is a rightwing thing, says study," said the Guardian. "Trump supporters share the most ‘junk' news, conspiracy theories: study," wrote Salon. "Trump supporters spread the majority of phony news on social media," according to Mother Jones. The Financial Times: "Hard right dominates use of fake US news, Oxford study finds."

Newsweek, the Week, and the Independent covered the study in the same way.
None of the news articles explain how the researchers defined "junk news," including a Washington Post analysis that used the study to argue there is a "Trumpian threat to democracy." Post analyses are intended to be "interpretation of the news based on evidence, including data."
The analysis does not include any reference to what websites are actually on the "junk news" list, but spreads the same deceptive claim that "Trump supporters shared the widest range of junk news."

The Post wrote that the study was based on "91 sources of propaganda" from "across the political spectrum" that are "deliberately misleading or masquerading as authentic reporting."

The Post stated that the study "restores a bit of clarity to what ‘fake news' actually represents."

In fact, an analysis of the "junk news" list reveals numerous flaws. The list was not derived from "across the political spectrum," but full of mainstream conservative news and commentary sites, with no mainstream sites from the left.