This is interesting as a work of network analysis, but I'm not sure how to connect this back to politics. It seems pretty clear to me whenever I browse /r/The_Donald that they're actively uninterested in fact-checking. There are posts hating on the new Netflix TV series "Dear White People" where people ask questions like "Do I even want to know what it's about?". There was a highly-upvoted image about Pizzagate with a leaked Podesta email on the left and a UrbanDictionary screenshot on the right defining some word as a lewd sex act—from the fourth page of results. Anyone who's ever been to UrbanDictionary knows that literally every word has a definition somewhere about it being a lewd sex act.
Are the majority of Trump (and Farage, and Petry, and so forth) voters similarly uninterested in actual facts? That seems unlikely to me, although certainly possible. I worry that the fringe of loud people on the internet isn't actually connected in a meaningful way to voters, and so analyzing the fringe isn't a good way to learn anything about the world at large, just about loud people on the internet.
Are the majority of Trump (and Farage, and Petry, and so forth) voters similarly uninterested in actual facts? That seems unlikely to me, although certainly possible. I worry that the fringe of loud people on the internet isn't actually connected in a meaningful way to voters, and so analyzing the fringe isn't a good way to learn anything about the world at large, just about loud people on the internet.