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 Dreadclaw69 wrote:
So if you knew that was the premise of the article then evidently the "Who was claiming that fake news was only a right-wing poor thing?" is already addressed, but for the purposes of clarity;
""It [fake news] affects both the right and the left. It affects educated and uneducated. So the stereotypes of it being simply right-wing and simply uneducated are 100% not true," says Jeff Green, who is the CEO of Trade Desk, an internet advertising company that was recently commissioned by American TV channel CBS to investigate who is reading and sharing fake news online."

This is a fairly junky argument. Not by you, but the source you are quoting. It is running on an old trick of setting up a claim you can dismiss, in order to deflect attention from one you'd rather not address. So here we see a nonsense claim being established, that 100% of fake news is right wing, and believed by only the poor. That claim can be quickly and easily dismissed, and is likely to lead the reader to assume that fake news affects everyone, right and left, educated and uneducated equally. It's that issue that is being talked around - we have seen in studies that while it is far from 100%, the right has had significantly more fake news than the left.

This might change, the BBC link in your OP said this is changing. But that doesn't mean we get to pretend things are completely equal, because someone says the issue exclusively the domain of one side of politics.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Peregrine wrote:
I suspect a part of is simply the fake news companies figuring out that there's a market to exploit. Why post only right-wing clickbait when you can post left-wing clickbait too, and get twice the advertising revenue?

Because you have to write each article. If you switch your writers to putting out liberal fake news, that's going to reduce the amount of conservative fake news you publish. It's an opportunity cost thing - you don't want to be giving up on Trump fake articles that average 10,000 clicks to write Clinton fake articles that only average 2,000 clicks.

The question then is whether the greater clicks of conservative fake news is a permanent thing, represent of cultural factors within the Republican base, and strucutural media issues within conservative media. Or whether it's just a product of being angrier and more energised (and therefore more willing to engage in junk news), which we will now see more among liberals as they are out of power.