Let's be honest. No one, outside of acedemics, really cared about information and the right is happily manufacturing their own.
If you can write something online and the only measure of it's accuracy is how much people agree with it then there is no limit to the stupid shit people will say is fact.
I know there are right wingers waiting in the wings to turn this all on me but believe me when I say this, you would be lost if it weren't for people better than yourself building what we have. The fact that you stand on top of it now and declare yourself the successors of logic and reason is what will make all of this collapse. Your world view is shit and you won't stop until hate unfurls what we've been desperately trying to preserve.
Figure 1. Association between factuality score adjusted by country mean, parties’ left-right ideology (right), and populism (middle), and government participation (left) with 95% confidence intervals.
I think this means that the y axis represents the deviation from the mean score, not the actual 'factuality score'.
The research draws on every tweet posted between 2017 and 2022 by every member of parliament with a Twitter (now X) account in 26 countries: 17 EU members including Austria, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden, but also the UK, US and Australia.
Their dataset is 100% from Twitter.
So the actual result of this study could be that there are more far-right populists in Twitter. A highly improbable conclusion, I know.
"More likely" would imply frequency of false information to overall tweets. Which would be split by political leaning already. The numbers of each side wouldn't matter much in that case
Not really, you take all those politicians, divide them in categories (left, center, right, populist or not) and check the % of lies per tweets for each category.
A more important issue is not "fake news" but rather highly biased and tightly framed news that purports to be neutral. The hegemonic narrative is actually extremely biased but never criticized. This is completely normalized and widespread in the imperial core, especially among both flavors of politicians.
I always like the "they're both the same" people who say things like, "they would oppress queer people too if they had the power!" And then you point out that they did have the power and didn't do anything near to the level the right does and they just shoo you away like a fly.