Come On, Putin. Do It!

[Autumnlicious]

Fake news from the left is just as bad as fake news from the right.

Can you demonstrate clearly that the magnitude of fake left news is comparable to fake right wing news? What makes you think that is an accurate statement?

Hm, this is a larger topic than I had initially figured.

On a singular basis of any two items in the category of fake news (i.e. In a vacuum), they may be equivalent for "bad".

However, that disregards:

1) Reach - the number of people who could be delivered an impression (they see a link to the fake news item)
2) Click through rate - the rate of people falling for it (i.e. They click on the article and linger on it)
3) secondary action rate - the rate of people who clicked on it (unique visit) who did something about it (sharing, donations, etc,)

For any two pieces of fake news to be comparable for badness, an index of the above would have to be comparable. Fake news that the President believes in is probably worse than fake news Joe the Plumber falls for... until you have too many Joes.

Fuck, I don't think we have a good enough objective basis for weighing fake news by political slant for the damage it does. As I have negative interest in ML and Natural Language parsing, I do not believe I will be able to shed conclusive light on the matter.