Assertion Supported AI assessment confidence: 92% certainty 4/5 debate potential 3/5

US users share vastly more junk news than European democracies

Samantha Bradshaw · Tracking Political Manipulation Through Social Media - Samantha Bradshaw · Y Combinator · Jan 23, 2019 · at 28:17

Samantha Bradshaw, researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute, compares international rates of online political misinformation.

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“During the UK elections, and Germany, and France, and Sweden, Mexico, all of those countries have much lower levels of junk news to professionally produced news shares than the US.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

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Insight
Fake Facebook accounts hold more influence because users expect authenticity
“Because it's so hard to create fake accounts on Facebook, the accounts that are fake might actually be a little bit more powerful because people don't expect there to be as many fake people on Facebook as they do Twitter, and so they might actually have more o…”
Samantha Bradshaw Jan 23, 2019 ▶ 12:29 Tracking Political Manipulation Through Social Media - Samantha Bradshaw · Y Combinator
Assertion Supported
Authoritarian regimes weaponize Germany's content moderation laws to silence dissent
“We're already also seeing authoritarian governments adopt this law into their own into their own legal systems to silence dissent and to go after journalists who are publishing so-called fake news and whatnot.”
Samantha Bradshaw Jan 23, 2019 ▶ 16:33 Tracking Political Manipulation Through Social Media - Samantha Bradshaw · Y Combinator
Assertion Supported
Americans shared junk news at a one-to-one ratio in 2016
“In 2016 we found that Americans on average were sharing about a one to one ratio of junk news to professionally produced information.”
Samantha Bradshaw Jan 23, 2019 ▶ 25:29 Tracking Political Manipulation Through Social Media - Samantha Bradshaw · Y Combinator
Assertion Supported
The junk news sharing ratio worsened to 1.3:1 during 2018 midterms
“In 2018, when we redid this analysis during the midterm, the ratio of junk news actually went up. And so it went to like 1.2 or 1.3 to one.”
Samantha Bradshaw Jan 23, 2019 ▶ 26:37 Tracking Political Manipulation Through Social Media - Samantha Bradshaw · Y Combinator
Insight
Platforms ignored fake accounts because active user metrics drove market valuations
“I think for a long time there hasn't been an incentive for them to, because the more active accounts there are on these platforms The more they're valued on the market, right? Because all of a sudden there's this huge user base of people, people that these pla…”
Samantha Bradshaw Jan 23, 2019 ▶ 13:12 Tracking Political Manipulation Through Social Media - Samantha Bradshaw · Y Combinator
Opinion
Direct content regulation fails to fix the underlying drivers of disinformation
“When governments go after the content of what's being shared I think that's a mistake. I don't think that's getting to the underlying problem that's sort of fueling the fake content or the disinformation to spread or to go viral in the first place.”
Samantha Bradshaw Jan 23, 2019 ▶ 15:14 Tracking Political Manipulation Through Social Media - Samantha Bradshaw · Y Combinator
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