Misinformation Discoverer

What problem does Misinformation Discoverer address?

Misinformation is a persistent theat on today’s Internet. The content of future misinformation (or fake news) is inherently unpredictable. So how do we discover potential fake news source preemptively? The idea is to focus on non-content signals, such as HTML page layouts or social network patterns. Misinformation Discoverer is an automated discovery system based on this content-agnostic approach. This repository is updated daily with newly discovered potential fake news domains.

To learn more about our method, please read our paper. Currently Misinformation Discoverer is tracking domains and tweets related to 2020 US election.

To assist researchres to investigate our discovered domains interactively. We developed a separate tool called Information Tracer. Information Tracer collects social media posts containing a URL from three platforms – Twitter, Facebook and Reddit. The system then generates summary statistics, and visualizes information spread on a web interface.

Example of a domain-domain interaction network. Each node is a domain, and two nodes are connected if users who share those two domains overlap above a threshold. Different color represents different communities, generated by Louvain clustering algorithm.

How does Misinformation Discoverer work?

Misinformation Discoverer is powered by a combination of unsupervised domain clustering and supervised domain classification algorithms. The systems works in three steps:

1. Collect live tweets on Twitter using a list of keywords
2. Resolve URLs embedded in all tweets, and construct a domain-domain interaction network based on user co-sharing pattern
3. Extract the largest connected component (which contains news-related domains), and use supervised fake news classifier to score all domains in this component
4. Select domains with a high fakeness score, collect their WHOIS and IP information
5. Publish results on Github page every 24 hours

Current data collections and job status

20210314	election	0.8	result
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	Date	Keyword	(link strength / threshold)	Job Status
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How can those threat intelligence benefit me?

As a reminder, our discovery system is not comprehensive. We only track domain-level fake news sites, and do not track misleading Twitter/Facebook/Reddit posts at this time. Nevertheless, domain remains a popular vehicle to spread misinformation, and we believe that our visualizationa and threat intelligence report can inform journalists, fact-checkers, security researchers and the general public.

We encourage you to take a look at our reports and graphs. If you find them helpful, contact us and we can email the daily threat intelligence report right to your mailbox.

Have other ideas? / Want to subscribe to get threat intelligence report? / Contact

Zhouhan Chen, NYU Center for Data Science, zc1245@nyu.edu