FAKE NEWS/GOP/MEDIA: “Led by President Donald Trump, Republicans have railed repeatedly against the New York Times, Washington Post and CNN—but, as a group, they trust mainstream sites like those more than ‘fake news’ sites or even highly partisan outlets like Breitbart and InfoWars, according to a Yale study that directly mirrored the methodology being used by Facebook to identify ‘trusted’ sites. By the same token, Democrats hold a definitively dim view of Fox News, but still rate it as more trustworthy than most fake and hyper-partisan sites.
The Yale study, published on Tuesday [2-6-18], suggests that as Facebook conducts its own surveys, designed to help the massive social network rank its own newsfeeds, mainstream media organizations could get a boost over fake and highly partisan sites. The authors of the Yale study – psychologists David Rand and Gordon Pennycock – said their findings suggest that Facebook may have developed a highly effective tool for weeding out false or deliberately misleading content. But the authors warned that they knew too little about how Facebook would use the information to be able to say for sure. Based on publicly available information, they said Facebook may be taking the wrong approach… In their study, Rand and Pennycook asked more than a thousand people to assess the trustworthiness of 60 different news sites—20 mainstream, 20 ‘hyper-partisan,’ like Breitbart, InfoWars and Daily Kos, and 20 ‘fake news’—using the exact same language that Facebook employs in its surveys. The study, which is not yet peer-reviewed, was performed over Amazon Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing marketplace often used to perform academic surveys.
The authors found that trust ratings for fake and hyper-partisan sites were significantly lower than mainstream outlets—as long as all trust ratings were included, regardless of whether the respondent had heard of the site… The downside to such an approach, Rand acknowledged, would be making it more difficult for new or credible but lesser-known sites to break through. A Facebook spokesperson contested Rand and Pennycook’s conclusion, saying that users could not assess the trustworthiness of a news outlet if they’ve never heard of it.”
-Jason Schwartz, “GOP voters trust CNN, N.Y. Times over Breitbart, InfoWars,” Politico, Feb. 6, 2018 03:33pm