Launching our Junk News Aggregator

We’re announcing the launch of a new tool, designed to help journalists and the public keep track of online misinformation and hoaxes as they spread in real time.

The Junk News Aggregator, created by Mimie Liotsiou, is an interactive tool for exploring junk news stories posted on Facebook, in the context of the 2018 US midterm elections. It offers a method for systematically studying misinformation on Facebook in real time, by making visible the quantity and the content of junk news on Facebook, as well as the levels of engagement with it.

Because all content on Facebook (including public content) is difficult to extract and study systematically, we hope that this tool will prove useful for journalists, researchers, and members of the public interested in exploring the data interactively. The Aggregator allows people to explore the data by sorting by time, engagement numbers, and searches for keywords of interest. It offers a general dashboard, a visual overview, plus a top-10 snapshot view of the day’s most engaging junk news stories on Facebook: the sources that deliberately publish misleading, deceptive or incorrect information purporting to be real news about politics, economics or culture. This content includes ideologically extreme, hyper-partisan, or conspiratorial news and information, as well as various forms of propaganda, and can be particularly problematic during key political moments like elections.

Dimitra (Mimie) Liotsiou, Bence Kollanyi, and Philip N. Howard, 2018. “The Junk News Aggregator: Tracking Junk News on Facebook ahead of the 2018 US Midterm Elections”. Project on Computational Propaganda. newsaggregator.oii.ox.ac.uk

Edit (6 February 2019): You can read more about the Junk News Aggregator in this manuscript: Dimitra (Mimie) Liotsiou, Bence Kollanyi, and Philip N. Howard, 2018. “The Junk News Aggregator: Examining junk news posted on Facebook, starting with the 2018 US Midterm Elections”. arXiv preprint arXiv:1901.07920

Read about the aggregator in TechCrunch: ‘Tool Up for the Midterms with this Facebook Junk News Aggregator. ‘