Junk News Aggregator
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Now that you have learned how to detect and analyze propaganda, do you want current examples of junk news to practice your investigative skills on? If so, the Junk News Aggregator from Oxford Internet Institute’s Computational Propaganda Project is the place to go!
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The Junk News Aggregator parses Facebook and finds collects posts from accounts that are known to spread disinformation. These posts are stored on the site for a month and can be searched based on the time they were posted or the number of reactions (likes, comments, and shares) that the post received.
In order to keep their database as unbiased as possible, the researchers have made their methodology very clear. Before the 2016 US presidential election, the researchers identified purveyors of junk news. To do this, the researchers searched Twitter for a list of messages with links to junk news sites and hashtags that supported political views on both sides of the spectrum. Then they up the number of times that a URL was shared with a political hashtag. For example, the CNSNews Facebook page shares rightwing content while the DailyBlue page circulates leftwing messages. After finding the 50 most shared junk news sites’ corresponding Facebook accounts, the researchers created the Aggregator. The Aggregator retrieves data from these public Facebook accounts and compiles into a searchable database.
There are several useful ways to use the Junk News Aggregator. To see the day’s most popular junk news stories, check out the site’s list of top 10 junk news posts or just browse the entire database. The Junk News Aggregator also allows users to filter content and find relevant news posts. If you want to test your propaganda analysis skills with some examples of junk news, the Junk News Aggregator is the place to go!
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