> this meta analysis is done

This wasn't a meta analysis.

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> - What does far right mean?

They obtained ratings from News Guard (https://www.newsguardtech.com/) and Media Bias Fact Check (https://mediabiasfactcheck.com). You can go to those sites to review their ratings to determine how well you think they do at rating sites: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/right, or https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/left.

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> - What does misinformation mean?

Again, that comes from NewsGuard and MediaBiasFactCheck, which you can investigate yourself.

> Finally, we rely on NewsGuard and Media Bias Fact Check as two independent resources that rank news sources by bias and reliability; we do not ourselves define which sites do or don’t traffic in dis- and misinformation, nor do we make judgments about political leanings

Admittedly, these two definitions defer the definition of misinformation to these other organizations, so that question is still validly raised. But they are pretty clear in the study what sources they rely on for those definitions.

If you disagree that philosophically we cannot label a news source with those labels at all, then that's fair (though I disagree). If you disagree with the particular data sources they've chosen to do the labeling that's fair. But if you think this paper isn't clear with what it means for something to be "far-right", or "disinformation", I disagree.

You can recurse on the methodologies to the various data providers, to see if you agree with them as well.

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> - Measuring engagement is much more involved than looking at comment totals

So noted, and they do more than looking at comment totals. They also note that there is more complexity

> From CrowdTangle, we collected data on how many users follow these pages, and how many likes, comments, or other interactions each of these pages’ public posts have garnered.

They explicitly note this as a limitation, and that they could do more comprehensive studies with more data, but that data is not publicly available

> Our findings are limited by the lack of data provided by Facebook, which makes public information about engagement — reactions, shares, and comments — but not impressions — how many people actually saw a piece of content, spent time reading it, and so on. Such information would help researchers better analyze why far-right content is more engaging.

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> On another note, does anyone else find it laughable that a researcher thinks they can so easily categorise political affiliations to internet communities?

They do not associate political affiliations to internet communities. They assign those sources to "news sources", not to "political communities".

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> I'm ripping on academics and the current state of research. The social sciences need to be reigned back in.

I find you've done a poor job of it in this case, with critiques that don't well apply to this study (the best critiques are around the subjectivity of the labeling of sources, the worst are those that are simply not accurate to this study).

I haven't reviewed the study in detail, so I'm not prepared to say it is high quality, but the criticisms you've leveled at it seem largely inaccurate based on my review of the study.

https://medium.com/cybersecurity-for-democracy/far-right-new...