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. Visual Junk News Aggregator: Screenshot (November 1, 2018)
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. Full Junk News Aggregator: Screenshot (November 1, 2018)
This tool for evaluating the spread of junk news on Facebook was built by the Computational Propaganda project (COMPROP) at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), University of Oxford.
Our aim in building this tool is to help researchers, policy makers, and social media platforms understand the impact of junk news on public life. We do not endorse the spread of junk news, and do not make money by aggregating this content.
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
