Misinformation "Superspreaders"

[Maxmars]

[REMOVED]

Wow!  Why didn't you just simply post that you hate ATS?

ATS was "loaded" with all sorts of people; men, women, young, old, many different 'categories.'
You do know that people can disagree with your UFO stories, or reject what you consider evidence, and NOT be "spinsters" or thought police, right?  

While I have no particular love for "ATS ownership" the whole "hiring ****s" and agenda comment comes off as if you've got a personal "hurt" manifesting here.  

I was a moderator on ATS too... are you accusing me of an "agenda" as well?  Do you imagine I "went to meetings" to discuss "plans" or get direction on how to squelch the speech of the members? (PS... no one "hired" me.)

Or are you thinking it was all about you?

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They say it on the research:

Similar to prior work (4, 6), we rely on a source-level definition of fake news as domains that portray as legitimate news outlets but do not have the “editorial norms and processes for ensuring the accuracy and credibility of information” (17). We rely on the manually labeled list of fake news sites by Grinberg et al. (4), updated using NewsGuard ratings, and demonstrate the robustness of the findings to different operationalizations (see supplementary materials, section S3). To focus on political news, we restrict the analysis to tweets with external links that were identified as political by a machine learning classifier that we trained and validated against human coders.

Thank you for teasing that out of the source material. 

They have a "manually labelled list" ... the fact that a source is on that list means "it's fake."  Doesn't that sound familiar?  

The fact that "NewsGuard" is being cited as authority makes it less reliable, not more.  Even marginally informed people like myself have read articles and or made threads about the "Newsguard" private enterprise and who uses it - and for what.

I offer an idea: 

Profiteering, monetized, and unscroupulous operators can algortihmically assess the 'frame of mind' of any user by mathematically analyzing what they read online, what they post, and who they are linked to.  The readily available "personal' information like voter roles, DMV data, "third-party data' all can be used to identify those 'users' most inclined and prone to react and share a certain kind of "editorialization."

We've all seen the "way" (particularly in monetized content) "media titles" and "content characterizations" of videos and articles are expressed to snag a user into clicking, or sharing.  Article which flatly state things like "Scientists are hiding this,..." or "They are destroying our country!," or "Don't let them get away with this!," "They don't want us to know...!," and even "Share this before they remove it!"

Who is most likely to respond to that?  Perhaps someone who is alarmed, who's opinion has been 'cultivated' by repeated and focused targetting via "algorithm."  

Just a foolishly outlandish idea, I guess.