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Welcome to the Misinformation Wiki

Utilities

• Glossary
• Polls about false beliefs
• Social Media Watchdog - Keeping track of what they're doing

Studies & Papers

Psychology

• Misinformation and Its Correction - 2012 psychology research summary, pulling together research on how we come to believe false information, and making recommendations about effective ways to convert individuals to true information

Media Literacy

• Stanford History Report - 2015/2016 study of middle, high school, & undergrad's civic online reasoning, in which all students fell far below the researchers' expected baseline.
• 'Who Shared It?': How Americans Decide What News to Trust on Social Media - Media Insight Project report showing that readers assess trust based on sharer more than news creator

Analyses of social media behavior

• Breitbart-led right-wing media ecosystem altered broader media agenda - March 2017 CJR analysis of links shared before election, showing that Breitbart formed core of a right-wing insulated media system
• Hyperpartisan Facebook Pages Are Publishing False And Misleading Information At An Alarming Rate - Oct 2016 Buzzfeed analysis of 6 hyperpartisan Facebook pages, finding that they were sharing a large amount of false or mostly false news
• This Analysis Shows How Viral Fake Election News Stories Outperformed Real News On Facebook - Nov 2016 Buzzfeed analysis finding that in the 3 months leading up to the election, engagement with fake content skyrocketed past engagement with real content
• Echo Chambers: Emotional Contagion and Group Polarization on Facebook - Italian study purporting to show how echo chambers form on Facebook (that I felt didn't do a great job of it)

Other Countries

• The Russian "Firehose of Falsehood" Propaganda Model - 2016 RAND paper about the tactics used by the current Russian government to spread misinformation. They are high volume and multi-channel, rapid, continuous, and repetitive, and this works despite having no commitment to objective reality or consistency.
• How the Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction, not Engaged Argument - 2017 paper looking at the Chinese '50c party' that astroturfs the Internet with fake social media

Other

• ‘Predatory’ open access: a longitudinal study of article volumes and market characteristics - 2015 Finnish study on predatory journals, finding that they rapidly increased their publication volume, but also that this problem is highly contained to a few countries where the journals originate

Reference Materials

• ALA Framework for Information Literacy - American Library Association's framework for teaching information literacy. Main concepts are that authority is contextual, information is created for conveying a message, knowledge is an ongoing conversation between information creators and users.

Articles

• Defense Against the Dark Arts: Networked Propaganda and Counter-Propaganda - post by Jonathan Stray that covers the Russia/China papers + Milo & offers a few recommendations
• Google and Facebook Can’t Just Make Fake News Disappear - post by danah boyd arguing that most of the proposed fake news solutions are band-aids over deeper-rooted cultural issues, and that we should focus solutions on ways to bridge social divide

Projects & Tools

• This is Fake (Install Plugin / Slate article ) - Chrome plugin made by Slate to identify fake news links on Facebook. Tags fake news and serial fabricators based on a database maintained through crowdsourcing + Slate curators
• OpenSources (Site / my wiki page ) - project by communications professor Melissa Zimdars to list and categorize "fake news" sites.
• TwitterTrails (Site) - Tool for algorithmically measuring the trustworthiness of stories shared on Twitter, by looking at how widely story spread & how skeptical users are about validity. Research project at Wellesley, funding from NSF. Created in 2014, not hugely active lately.
• Hoaxy (Site) - tool to visualize how fake news is spread on Twitter. When you search for a term, it goes through a list of public sources known for fake news to find headlines that match. Then searches twitter to make a map of who shared and retweeted the links. Created by Indiana University and the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research.
• Media Cloud (Website)- open source platform for studying media ecosystems, by MIT Media Lab. Archive of stories, and set of tools for analyzing the data such as Controversy Mapper (visualizing how ideas spread online) and Attention Plotter (graphing volumes of content from media sources). Requires registration/permission to access
• Design Solutions for Fake News (Google Doc) - google doc started by Eli Pariser that attempts to collate links, events, ideas, discussion around fake news. Somewhat inactive since Nov/Dec.
• Newsela (Site / Slate article)- edtech startup that uses current news stories to teach reading comprehension to kids, by adapting stories from major outlets to different reading levels, and creating short quizzes. Company has 22mil in venture funding, supposedly used in 75% of schools. Slate writer thought the tool didn't engage with controversial stories and left out context when it might cast judgement.
• Bellingcat (Site / recent kickstarter) - project by Eliot Higgins that uses "open source and social media investigation" to look into claims, and makes guides/case studies/training workshops to teach people how to run such investigations.
• The Lamp (Site) - NYC-based nonprofit working on improving media literacy among youths. Runs workshops and develops curriculums for schools.
• Stopfake (Site / NYT article) - project to publicly debunk false information about Ukraine
• Data Refuge Project (Site / WaPo article) - archive & catalog for federal data, particularly climate/environmental research, that this group of librarians/scientists believe could be removed by the government