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Blue Feed, Red Feed. What is this?

Blue Feed, Red Feed

Recent posts from sources where the majority of shared articles aligned “very liberal” (blue, on the left) and “very conservative” (red, on the right) in a large Facebook study. In 2015, the journal Science published a research paper by Facebook scientists (Bakshy, Eytan; Messing, Solomon; Adamic, Lada, 2015, “Replication Data for: Exposure to Ideologically Diverse News and Opinion on Facebook”, Harvard Dataverse, V2) which looked at how a subset of the social network’s users reacted to the news appearing in their feeds.

For six months, Facebook tracked and analyzed the content shared by 10.1 million of its users (who were anonymized). These users had identified their political views in their own profiles on Facebook. Confessions of a Trump Fact-Checker. When Donald Trump ludicrously accused Hillary Clinton, at the first presidential debate, of trying to fight the Islamic State for her “entire adult life,” Clinton didn’t offer a rebuttal.

Confessions of a Trump Fact-Checker

Instead, she issued a request: “Please, fact-checkers, get to work.” They were already working. Thanks to the brazenness of Trump’s deceit, fact-checking, that unglamorous journalistic activity once mostly relegated to niche websites and little boxes beside newspaper articles, is having a moment. Big news organizations now assign teams of reporters to fact-check the debates in real time.

CNN, among other networks, is using its bottom-screen chyrons to challenge Trump’s most obvious lies.

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Presidential debates. Third-party presidential candidates fight for 15% in polls – and a spot in debates. The former Republican, marijuana-smoking, Everest mountaineering ex-governor of New Mexico and presidential nominee of the Libertarian party has a problem: he’s barred from the presidential debates.

Third-party presidential candidates fight for 15% in polls – and a spot in debates

To appear on stage with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump this autumn, Gary Johnson needs to boost his national polling numbers to 15% from around 8% now. Without that national exposure, and the blockbuster ratings the three scheduled Clinton-Trump dust-ups are likely to produce, it’s hard for anyone to see how Johnson, 63, or either of two other minor-party candidates, the Green party’s Jill Stein or even Evan McMullin, a 40-year-old former CIA counterterrorism officer, could ever become more than mere electoral curiosities.

But the emergence of three independent candidates, during a year of record dissatisfaction with the major party candidates, may still make for an unpredictable twist to the story. “A wasted vote is voting for somebody you don’t believe in. How media coverage shapes presidential polling more than we think. The 2016 election campaign has been marked by the media-driven popularity of New York billionaire, Donald Trump.

How media coverage shapes presidential polling more than we think.

But to what extent do the media influence how candidates do in the polls? By studying polling data from the 2012 presidential election, Dan Cassino finds that one day of positive media coverage can lift a candidate by as much as 2.5 percent in the polls, a number that in 2016 may be even higher in Donald Trump’s case. Pundits tell us all the time that media coverage is driving the current Presidential primary, that Donald Trump and other outsider candidates are only doing well because they attract so much attention from the press. But in an era when people can choose their media sources to match what they already think, can the press really be having a huge impact on who people support?

Why is Ben Carson surging? Once again, it’s the media. Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson attends an antiabortion rally opposing federal funding for Planned Parenthood on July 28, 2015 in Washington, D.C.

Why is Ben Carson surging? Once again, it’s the media.

(Photo by Olivier Douliery/Getty Images) The surge of support for Ben Carson is making some people curious. Howard Kurtz suggests Carson’s surge is “under the media radar.” That’s exactly backwards. Carson’s surge is arguably because he got back on the media’s radar.