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0 pointswar10255y ago0 comments

> It's pretty backed up by evidence (and honestly attending a Trump ralley), that the average voter of Trump is less educated, much more prone to misinformation, and simply holds a ton of trivially wrong beliefs about the state of the world.

This is just as true of your "average" Democrat. The "average" person is woefully misinformed about most things. It's probably safe to say that nearly everyone, myself and the majority of the HN crowd included, is misinformed about many things that aren't critical to our day to day life.

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Barrin925y ago

It's not as true and there's actually been studies on the particular voter behaviour in 2016, and belief in 'fake news' (as in literally made up stuff) was a strong predictor of defection from the Democratic to the Republican ticket, and there's solid psychological evidence why this affects conservatives in particular[1]

It's also very trivial to see if you eyeball the size of the market for misinformation. While there are some highly partisan left-wing media in the US, and there were some facebook pages targetting say, Bernie voters it paled in the market for the Trump base, literally by a magnitude or so in revenue. Which I think is very obvious too if one looks at the size of the audiences of youtube channels attracting those audiences or people like Alex Jones.

NPR in 2016 actually did an interview with one such 'entrepreneur', who actually tried to sell fake news to virtually everyone, but had very little success with liberal audiences.[2]

[1]https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/02/why-fake...

[2]https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/23/50...

war1025OP5y ago

For one, the two articles you linked are from liberal media sources. Of course they are going to find fault with conservatives.

More importantly, just because conservatives are more likely to believe a certain form of fake news doesn't mean liberals are immune to being misled. All it means is that conservatives are motivated by different things than liberals, and will therefore latch on to a particular flavor of things that confirm their beliefs. Liberals love confirmation bias just as much as anyone.

Find any random person on the street and ask them to explain why they hold the views they do. You'll quickly find that opinions are based on emotion and backfilled later with plausible explanations.

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