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# Organization Releases Fake News “Cookbook”
- URL: https://capitolcommunicator.com/organization-releases-cookbook-for-fake-news/
- Published: 2018-01-08T21:47:45.000Z
- Updated: 2018-01-09T01:38:00.000Z
- Author: Capitol Communicator
- Tags: Media, Insights, #Import 2026-10-08 18:49

**If you’re curious where all the fake news on your News Feed comes from**, there’s a new resource that could help you become an internet sleuth of your own, reports Poynter, which stated that “the [Public Data Lab](https://publicdatalab.org/?ref=capitolcommunicator.com), a network of researchers, journalists and organizations, released [a field guide](http://fakenews.publicdatalab.org/?ref=capitolcommunicator.com) for detecting and investigating online misinformation. The free and open-access guide, aimed at helping students, journalists and educators, contains a number of “recipes” for tracing things like trolling practices, the circulation of viral memes and the financial incentives that hold it all together.

“It’s like a cookbook, but for fake news.

““The value of the guide is that it provides practical, simple, step-by-step instructions for journalists to actually dive into these networks and help find and visualize connections and patterns,” said Claire Wardle, executive director of First Draft — a project of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy that supported the guide — in an email to Poynter.

““Too much of the reporting on this subject is not based on the data, and while not everyone is a computational journalist, the recipes outlined in this guide mean that most people can run some basic analysis of the online disinformation networks they are writing about.”

“The guide comes as a result of growing demand for understanding how misinformation, platforms and politics come together online, according to a Monday press release, and its primary audience is students, journalists and researchers who want to investigate fake news on their own. Several universities and media organizations have tested it since a sample was released in April, notably BuzzFeed News in [an investigation](https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/fake-news-real-ads?utm%5Fterm=.yekq65eey&ref=capitolcommunicator.com#.inXV4OZZ0) of ad trackers on fake news sites.”

You can read the full story [here](https://www.poynter.org/news/new-guide-cookbook-investigating-fake-news?ref=capitolcommunicator.com).