Many conservatives have a loose relationship with facts. The right-wing denial of what most people think of as accepted reality starts with political issues: As recently as 2016, 45 percent of Republicans still believed that the Affordable Care Act included “death panels” (it doesn’t). A 2015 poll found that 54 percent of GOP primary voters believed then-President Obama to be a Muslim (…he isn’t).

Why are conservatives so susceptible to misinformation? The right wing’s disregard for facts and reasoning is not a matter of stupidity or lack of education. College-educated Republicans are actually more likely than less-educated Republicans to have believed that Barack Obama was a Muslim and that “death panels” were part of the ACA. And for political conservatives, but not for liberals, greater knowledge of science and math is associated with a greater likelihood of dismissing what almost all scientists believe about the human causation of global warming.___

  • TheObviousSolution@lemm.ee
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    14 hours ago

    Because they aren’t “conservatives”, that’s just a label they slap onto themselves and their changes are more radical than those they label “liberals”. What they really are is what you’ve said, voters more susceptible to believing lies, the psychotypes that have been identified through social network big data profiling that are particularly susceptible or within a network susceptible to manipulation. That’s also why a lot of these social network are pretty shameless about how they want to stimulate fake AI users. It is the cattle-lification of social network for those with the wealth and the power to do it, to such an extent that terms like 1984’s “doublethink” apply quite aptly well beyond the theoretical.