Organization Releases Fake News “Cookbook”

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, a network of researchers, journalists and organizations, released a field guide 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 of ad trackers on fake news sites.”

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