Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2019 18:39:22 -0700
Once again reported through the resourcefulness of Gary Price's
INFODOCKET. This resource makes an aggregation of postings to
Facebook from known "junk news" providers and enables searches and
processing. Why would you want to collect junk news? Because it is
of historical and even current interest to know which lies, myths, and
exaggerations are being told and propagated.
Jim O'Donnell
ASU
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Date: Sat, Jan 26, 2019 at 5:55 PM
Subject: infoDOCKET: Research Paper: “The Junk News Aggregator:
Examining Junk News Posted on Facebook, Starting with the 2018 US
Midterm Elections” (Preprint)
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The following research article (preprint) was recently shared on arXiv.
Title
The Junk News Aggregator: Examining Junk News Posted on Facebook,
Starting with the 2018 US Midterm Elections
Authors
Dimitra (Mimie) Liotsiou
Oxford Internet Institute
Bence Kollanyi
Oxford Internet Institute
Philip N. Howard
Oxford Internet Institute
Source
via arXiv
January 24, 2019
Abstract
In recent years, the phenomenon of online misinformation and junk news
circulating on social media has come to constitute an important and
widespread problem affecting public life online across the globe,
particularly around important political events such as elections. At
the same time, there have been calls for more transparency around
misinformation on social media platforms, as many of the most popular
social media platforms function as “walled gardens,” where it is
impossible for researchers and the public to readily examine the scale
and nature of misinformation activity as it is unfolding on the
platforms. In order to help address this,this paper, we present the
Junk News Aggregator, an interactive web tool made publicly available,
which allows the public to examine, in near real-time, all of the
public content posted to Facebook by important junk news sources in
the US. It allows the public to gain access to and examine the latest
articles posted on Facebook(the most popular social media platform in
the US and one where content is not readily accessible at scale from
the open Web), as well as organise them by time, news publisher, and
keywords of interest, and sort them based on all eight engagement
metrics available on Facebook. Therefore, the Aggregator allows the
public to gain insights on the volume,content, key themes, and types
and volumes of engagement received by content posted by junk news
publishers, in near real time, hence opening up and offering
transparency in these activities, at scale across the top most popular
junk news publishers and in near real time. In this way, the
Aggregator can help increase transparency around the nature, volume,
and engagement with junk news on social media, and serve as a media
literacy tool for the public.
Direct to Full Text (Preprint)
10 pages; PDF