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PoliticusUSA
Available inEnglish
Founded2009
Country of originUnited States

PoliticusUSA is an American left-wing[1] website that publishes hyperpartisan[2] clickbait.[3] Its content has been described by academic studies and journalistic reports as "unreliable," "misleading," and "fake".[4] It is among the most popular U.S. political websites.

PoliticusUSA was established in 2009.

Content

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PoliticusUSA's editorial mission is to convey "news, political commentary & analysis from a liberal point of view" [sic].[5] While the site aligns itself with a clear political agenda, it rejects the notion that it is politically biased.[6]

Various academic studies and journalistic reports have identified PoliticusUSA as a left-leaning[1] publisher of hyperpartisan content;[2] "misleading," "unreliable" or "fake" news;[4] and clickbait.[3] Writing for Vice, Mike Pearl has described PoliticusUSA as "so one-sided that it's hard to be fully informed if that's all you read",[7] while Slate's Ben Mathis-Lilley has characterized PoliticusUSA as a "low-budget" site "loaded with browser-murdering junk ads".[8] Dante Ramos, a Boston Globe columnist, described a 2016 PoliticusUSA column titled "“Obama Just Annihilated Donald Trump with the Whole World Watching" as "clickbait" and noted it was among a type of story that "never live up to their billing".[9]

PoliticusUSA has published health and medical misinformation. For instance, a 2015 article on the site claimed that the National Institutes of Health discovered marijuana "kills cancer", an assertion rated as False by Snopes,[10][11] while a 2020 article claimed that the entire population of Oklahoma who took a COVID-19 test, tested positive for the virus, which PolitiFact graded False.[12]

Other stories on PoliticusUSA have also been discredited by fact checkers and mainstream media. For example, in 2018, according to Bloomberg, the site "misleadingly reported ... [Donald] Trump asked for the constitution to be changed so he can be president for 16 years"[13] The previous year, PoliticusUSA reported that "Senior White House officials" stated the 2017 Shayrat missile strike was "intended to make Trump look strong", a claim Snopes classified as False.[14] Also in 2017, PoliticusUSA published a story that claimed "the Russians" had created a fake Bernie Sanders Facebook fan page, a story The Observer described as "fake news".[15][16]

In 2018, PoliticusUSA re-reported a story from The Guardian that alleged Paul Manafort met with Julian Assange in the embassy of Ecuador in the United Kingdom, a meeting both Manafort and Assange denied taking place.[17][18] The claims in the story were criticized by Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting for, according to researcher Benjamin Horne, "relying on anonymous sources, not providing any verifiable details, and being, in general, unbelievable given the high level of surveillance in the area surrounding the embassy".[18][17] In a later investigation of the story, Slate described it as "journalistic malpractice" and riddled with "serious problems"; The Intercept concluded there was no reason to believe the story was true.[19][20]

Influence and reach

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During the time period May 1, 2015 to November 7, 2016, posts on PoliticusUSA that were shared to Twitter and Facebook were among the most-accessed U.S. political content.[21] A 2017 study by Harvard researchers found that PoliticusUSA articles received "substantially more attention on social media than they receive inlinks from open web media".[22] In the summer of 2018, PoliticusUSA traffic coming through Facebook had fallen roughly 80 percent, year over year, after Facebook began demoting from newsfeeds sites "repeatedly dinged by fact-checkers".[13]

As part of a 2020 study, researchers from the Polytechnic University of Milan found that the virality on Twitter of posts by PoliticusUSA and Breitbart outweighed all other sources examined in their research for reach and impact.[23]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ a b Sources describing PoliticusUSA's content as "left", "left-wing", "leftist", or "left-leaning" include:
    • Che, Xunru. "Fake News in the News: An Analysis of Partisan Coverage of the Fake News Phenomenon" (PDF). CSCW’18 Companion. University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Retrieved April 10, 2023.
    • Yochai, Benkler (2018). Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics. Oxford University Press. p. 184. ISBN 9780190923624.
    • Grossman, Jeremy (2018). Dreaming of Disaster: Displacements of Public Memory and Hurricane Katrina (PDF) (Ph.D. thesis). University of Georgia. Retrieved January 1, 2024.
  2. ^ a b Sources describing PoliticusUSA's content as either "hyperpartisan" or "highly polarized" include:
  3. ^ a b Sources describing PoliticusUSA's content as "clickbait" or classifying PoliticusUSA as a "clickbait" site include:
  4. ^ a b Sources describing PoliticusUSA's content as "fake news", "unreliable" or "misleading" include:
  5. ^ Greico, Elizabeth (January 29, 2018). "Few sites linked to in immigration-related tweets explicitly stated a political ideology or 'anti-establishment' focus". Pew Research Center. Retrieved April 10, 2023.
  6. ^ Robertson, Craig T.; Mourão, Rachel R. (2020-09-13). "Faking Alternative Journalism? An Analysis of Self-Presentations of "Fake News" Sites". Digital Journalism. 8 (8): 13. doi:10.1080/21670811.2020.1743193. ISSN 2167-0811.
  7. ^ Pearl, Mike (August 26, 2017). "No, Kid Rock Isn't on the Verge of Becoming a Senator". Vice. Retrieved April 10, 2023.
  8. ^ Matthis-Lilley, Ben (October 30, 2019). "Let's All Stop Mindlessly Clicking and Sharing Zombie Links". Slate. Retrieved January 1, 2024.
  9. ^ Ramos, Dante (August 1, 2016). "Memo to partisans: Sharing wishful-thinking clickbait doesn't help". Boston Globe. Retrieved January 3, 2024.
  10. ^ Kasprak, Alex (June 4, 2018). "Did the National Cancer Institute 'Finally Admit' That Marijuana Kills Cancer?". Snopes. Retrieved April 10, 2023.
  11. ^ Zeng, Huai-Kuan; Wu, Tai-Yee; Atkin, David J. (2023-01-02). "Check the Report and Comments: The Veracity Assessment of Unfamiliar News on Social Media". Digital Journalism. 11 (1): 161–180. doi:10.1080/21670811.2022.2079541. ISSN 2167-0811.
  12. ^ Kertscher, Tom (June 29, 2020). ""Oklahoma 100% coronavirus test rate after Trump Tulsa rally."". PolitiFact. Retrieved April 10, 2023.
  13. ^ a b Elgin, Ben (April 24, 2018). "Facebook's Battle Against Fake News Notches an Uneven Scorecard". Bloomberg. Retrieved April 15, 2023.
  14. ^ Emery, David (April 8, 2017). "White House Admits Syria Missile Attack Was a Publicity Stunt to Make Trump Look Good?". Snopes. Retrieved January 1, 2024.
  15. ^ Sainato, Michael (March 22, 2017). "Rachel Maddow Asserts Russian Government Incited 'Bot Attack' on Sanders Groups". The Observer. Retrieved January 3, 2024.
  16. ^ Easley, Jason (March 21, 2017). "Liberals Fight for America". PoliticusUSA. Archived from the original on January 4, 2024. Retrieved January 3, 2024.
  17. ^ a b Horne, Benjamin (2020). Robust News Veracity Detection (PDF) (PhD thesis). Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute University.
  18. ^ a b Adalı, Sibel (2019). "Different Spirals of Sameness: A Study of Content Sharing in Mainstream and Alternative Media". Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media. 13: 265. arXiv:1904.01534. doi:10.1609/icwsm.v13i01.3227.
  19. ^ MacLeod, Alan (December 7, 2018). "The Manafort-Assange meeting that wasn't: A case study in journalistic malpractice". Slate. Retrieved April 10, 2023.
  20. ^ Greenwald, Glen (November 27, 2018). "It Is Possible Paul Manafort Visited Julian Assange. If True, There Should Be Ample Video and Other Evidence Showing This". The Intercept. Retrieved April 11, 2023.
  21. ^ Benkler, Yochai (2018). Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. pp. 269–288. doi:10.1093/oso/9780190923624.003.0009. ISBN 978-0190923631.
  22. ^ Partisanship, Propaganda and Disinformation (PDF). Berkman Klein Center. August 2017. p. 15. Retrieved April 10, 2023.
  23. ^ Ceri, Stefano (23 November 2020). "A multi-layer approach to disinformation detection in US and Italian news spreading on Twitter". EPJ Data Science. 9 (35). doi:10.1140/epjds/s13688-020-00253-8. hdl:11311/1154006. Retrieved April 10, 2023.
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