Among those who shared any political content on Twitter during the election, fewer than 5% of people on the left or in the center ever shared any fake news content, yet 11 and 21% of people on the right and extreme right did

Grinberg, N., Joseph, K., Friedland, L., Swire-Thompson, B., & Lazer, D. (2019). Fake news on Twitter during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Science, 363(6425), 374–378. doi:10.1126/science.aau2706

  • Five@slrpnk.netOPEnglish
    162·
    4 months ago

    It’s not even close to fake news. Logarithmic scales are standard in this kind of visualization. The thrust of the result is that right-wing people share more fake news, and if you look at the graph, this is clear. If you mistake the X-axis as a linear scale, the result makes the effect less pronounced, not more.

    So if anything, the graph undersells the thesis in the name of creating a more compact and readable visualization. There is no deception here.

    • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
      43·
      4 months ago

      If you mistake the X-axis as a linear scale, the result makes the effect less pronounced, not more.

      Exactly, and that’s the problem! When the chart makes it look like the right “only” shares maybe twice as much fake news when it’s actually 10x-100x more, it makes the right look way less bad than it actually is.

        • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          4 months ago

          I’m less upset about those, but I agree that it would be nice to have a vertical gap between them and the ideological clusters above to make it clearer that they’re orthogonal categories of grouping.