Conspiracy Stories: Building Archives to Facilitate Narrative Analyses of Online Fake News
- 1. Conspiracy Stories: Building Archives to Facilitate Narrative Analyses of Online Fake News Peter Broadwell (@PeterBroadwell) Digital Library Program University of California, Los Angeles IFLA International News Media Conference Reykjavík, Iceland, 27-28 April 2017
- 2. Peter Broadwell (@PeterBroadwell) - UCLA Digital Library Building Archives to Facilitate Narrative Analyses of Fake News IFLA International News Media Conference, 27 April 2017 Fake news is… 2 1 Jacob L. Nelson. 2017. “Is ‘fake news’ a fake problem?” Columbia Journalism Review, January 31, 2017 • Difficult to define and identify • A badly overused term – especially these days • Prominent on social media: 30% of traffic to fake news sites is from Facebook; which is true for only 8% of legitimate news • Financed by online advertising systems (Google), and maybe some governments • Now seen as a serious issue by journalists and some Internet companies (finally) • Not as dire a problem as some believe?1 • Worthy of further study
- 3. Peter Broadwell (@PeterBroadwell) - UCLA Digital Library Building Archives to Facilitate Narrative Analyses of Fake News IFLA International News Media Conference, 27 April 2017 3 Gregor Aisch, Jon Huang, Cecilia Kang,“Dissecting the #PizzaGate Conspiracy Theories,” New York Times, December 10, 2016 Analyzing the “shape” of conspiracy stories
- 4. Peter Broadwell (@PeterBroadwell) - UCLA Digital Library Building Archives to Facilitate Narrative Analyses of Fake News IFLA International News Media Conference, 27 April 2017 Title 4 TR Tangherlini, V Roychowdhury, B Glenn, CM Crespi, R Bandari, A Wadia, M Falahi, E Ebrahimzadeh, R Bastani. 2016. “‘Mommy Blogs’ and the Vaccination Exemption Narrative: Results From A Machine-Learning Approach for Story Aggregation on Parenting Social Media Sites.” JMIR Public Health Surveillance 2:2 (2016).
- 5. Peter Broadwell (@PeterBroadwell) - UCLA Digital Library Building Archives to Facilitate Narrative Analyses of Fake News IFLA International News Media Conference, 27 April 2017 Don’t believe everything you read online… 5 http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/ucla-researchers-teach-computer-to-read-the-internet
- 6. Peter Broadwell (@PeterBroadwell) - UCLA Digital Library Building Archives to Facilitate Narrative Analyses of Fake News IFLA International News Media Conference, 27 April 2017 6 TR Tangherlini, V Roychowdhury, B Glenn, CM Crespi, R Bandari, A Wadia, M Falahi, E Ebrahimzadeh, R Bastani. 2016. “‘Mommy Blogs’ and the Vaccination Exemption Narrative: Results From A Machine-Learning Approach for Story Aggregation on Parenting Social Media Sites.” JMIR Public Health Surveillance 2:2 (2016). Narrative framework analysis
- 7. Peter Broadwell (@PeterBroadwell) - UCLA Digital Library Building Archives to Facilitate Narrative Analyses of Fake News IFLA International News Media Conference, 27 April 2017 Building our own “fake news” web archive 7
- 8. Peter Broadwell (@PeterBroadwell) - UCLA Digital Library Building Archives to Facilitate Narrative Analyses of Fake News IFLA International News Media Conference, 27 April 2017 8 Or… using someone else’s archive?
- 9. Peter Broadwell (@PeterBroadwell) - UCLA Digital Library Building Archives to Facilitate Narrative Analyses of Fake News IFLA International News Media Conference, 27 April 2017 9 Small-scale case studies: Pizzagate and Bridgegate
- 10. Peter Broadwell (@PeterBroadwell) - UCLA Digital Library Building Archives to Facilitate Narrative Analyses of Fake News IFLA International News Media Conference, 27 April 2017 Pre-selected “archives” of coverage 10
- 11. Peter Broadwell (@PeterBroadwell) - UCLA Digital Library Building Archives to Facilitate Narrative Analyses of Fake News IFLA International News Media Conference, 27 April 2017 Web archives: too much data, not enough information 11 In WANE files Extracted by DBpedia Spotlight 3,376 unique names 954 unique Wikipedia entities Christie_(P): 376 Tony_(P): 241 Chris_Christie_(P): 236 David_Wildstein_(P): 190 Bridget_Anne_Kelly_(P): 169 Chris_Christie_(P): 435 David_Wildstein_(P): 263 Bridget_Anne_Kelly_(P): 222 Bill_Baroni_(P): 194 Mark_Sokolich_(P): 130 • 2 seed URLs, 1 from Huffington Post, 1 from NJ Record • Full Archive-It WARCs contain 124,355 unique linked URLs • But 47,398 are adverts/spam, 73,544 likely news articles • Only 415 news articles (163 from HuffPo, 252 from the Record) are relevant to Bridgegate (.5%)
- 12. Peter Broadwell (@PeterBroadwell) - UCLA Digital Library Building Archives to Facilitate Narrative Analyses of Fake News IFLA International News Media Conference, 27 April 2017 Returning to Pizzagate… 12
- 13. Peter Broadwell (@PeterBroadwell) - UCLA Digital Library Building Archives to Facilitate Narrative Analyses of Fake News IFLA International News Media Conference, 27 April 2017 13 Gregor Aisch, Jon Huang, Cecilia Kang,“Dissecting the #PizzaGate Conspiracy Theories,” New York Times, December 10, 2016 Can we generate this computationally?
- 14. Peter Broadwell (@PeterBroadwell) - UCLA Digital Library Building Archives to Facilitate Narrative Analyses of Fake News IFLA International News Media Conference, 27 April 2017 14 A simple Pizzagate network model
- 15. Peter Broadwell (@PeterBroadwell) - UCLA Digital Library Building Archives to Facilitate Narrative Analyses of Fake News IFLA International News Media Conference, 27 April 2017 15 Towards a useful Pizzagate network model
- 16. Peter Broadwell (@PeterBroadwell) - UCLA Digital Library Building Archives to Facilitate Narrative Analyses of Fake News IFLA International News Media Conference, 27 April 2017 16 Bridgegate network, highlighting “degree”
- 17. Peter Broadwell (@PeterBroadwell) - UCLA Digital Library Building Archives to Facilitate Narrative Analyses of Fake News IFLA International News Media Conference, 27 April 2017 17 Bridgegate network, showing “betweenness”
- 18. Peter Broadwell (@PeterBroadwell) - UCLA Digital Library Building Archives to Facilitate Narrative Analyses of Fake News IFLA International News Media Conference, 27 April 2017 Archiving fake news for research… 18 • Is difficult to do well • Requires constant monitoring and checking of targeted sites, given capabilities of existing tools • Would benefit from coordination between institutions to distribute web-crawling tasks • Entails a great deal of manual and semi-automated content classification and filtering after collection • Calls for the use of more sophisticated tools for named entity resolution, disambiguation and versioning of archival content • Is potentially very worthwhile, despite these issues
- 19. Peter Broadwell (@PeterBroadwell) - UCLA Digital Library Building Archives to Facilitate Narrative Analyses of Fake News IFLA International News Media Conference, 27 April 2017 Thanks! 19 • Prof. Tim Tangherlini, UCLA Scandinavian Section • Prof. Vwani Roychowdhury, UCLA Electrical Engineering • Ph.D. students, UCLA Electrical Engineering: • Ehsan Ebrahimzadeh • Behnam Shahbazi • Misagh Falahi • Mark Graham, Internet Archive • Karl Blumenthal, Archive-It