Mike Cernovich is a far-right personality who has claimed that “date rape does not exist.” His misogynistic writings catapulted him to fame within the anti-feminist men’s rights movement and GamerGate, a 2014 movement which harassed women in the gaming industry.
Cernovich later became a high-profile supporter of Donald Trump and a major promoter of the #PizzaGate conspiracy, which falsely claimed a child sex trafficking ring was being run in the nonexistent basement of a Washington DC pizza place popular with Democratic politicians.
Freshman Congresswoman Lauren Boebert (R-CO) goes to Cernovich for her news updates.
This insight into Boebert’s news intake as well as the media consumption of all 535 Members of Congress comes courtesy of a new study by Ground News, a digital media outlet that compares news stories for political bias.
The study was conducted with the company’s new tool, Blindspotter. The Blindspotter algorithm analyzes a Twitter account’s tweets, likes, retweets and replies in order to figure out the account holder’s news diet and the ideological bias that news slant produces. The tool provides a Twitter user’s top three sources for news and three “news influencers” they regularly interact with. As of today, the Blindspotter tool is now available for anyone to use.
“At a time when Congress is more ideologically divided than ever, the study reveals the media feedback loops deepening those divisions,” said Ground News CEO and co-founder Harleen Kaur in a statement provided to Mashable. “It appears that highly partisan news sources are playing an influential role in shaping the opinions of the lawmakers whose policies affect the lives of millions of Americans.”
While Boebert’s news bias profile leans fairly right — along with Cernovich, she interacts with the NRA and Donald Trump’s now-suspended account the most — she’s by no means the member of Congress with the most right-leaning news diet on Twitter.
That distinction goes to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), the freshman Congresswoman with a history of promoting misinformation related to the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory.
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According to the Ground News study, Rep. Greene’s top sources for news consist of right-wing outlets such as Breitbart, Washington Times, and Fox News. She regularly interacts with Big League Politics, a far-right outlet that regularly spreads falsehoods and misinformation. Greene also gets her news on Twitter from OANN anchor Jack Posobiec, who has been tied to neo-Nazis and white supremacist groups.
There are many other interesting findings from the study as well. For example, one of Rep. Madison Cawthorn’s (R-NC) top news sources on Twitter is Not The Bee, a conservative outlet run by the satirical right-wing website The Babylon Bee.
Another example is Congressman Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), who the study found is influenced by the Twitter account @ThomasSowell. However, the account does not belong to the Black conservative thinker Sowell himself. It’s run by a user that describes themselves as “not Thomas Sowell, but I own all of his books and tweet quotes from them” in their Twitter bio. (Interestingly, Rep. Crenshaw has a fairly balanced news diet on Twitter, taking in sources from right, left, and center).
The study also includes news bias which exists on the other side of the aisle as well.
However, the bias on the Democratic side of the aisle tends to lie within more respectable news organizations. For example, Senator Bernie Sanders’ (D-VT) frequent sources for news on Twitter are CNN, The Washington Post, and progressive YouTube channel The Young Turks. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) gets her news from the New York Times, a variety of NBC News reporters, and The Intercept.
As Ground News CEO Kaur previously told me, the organization’s hope is that its online tools help users pop their filter bubble and consume a news diet consisting of a variety of sources across the ideological spectrum.