A Field Guide to "Fake News" and Other Information Disorders

"We hope this guide will contribute to facilitating broader public debate and involvement around processes of reshaping platforms and policies, laws and infrastructures, technologies and standards that are implicated in the circulation of fake news and other fabrications."

This field guide explores the use of digital methods to study false viral news, political memes, trolling practices, and their social life online. Public Data Lab, with support from First Draft, created it in response to an increasing demand for understanding the interplay between digital platforms, misleading information, propaganda, and viral content practices, and their influence on politics and public life in democratic societies. The guide aims to be an accessible learning resource for digitally savvy students, journalists, and researchers interested in this topic.

"The guide explores the notion that fake news is not just another type of content that circulates online, but that it is precisely the character of this online circulation and reception that makes something into fake news." To that end, the field guide "encourages a shift from focusing on the formal content of fabrications in isolation to understanding the contexts in which they circulate online....In doing so[,] while we start our inquiry with fake news, we end up surfacing a wide range of grassroots political, media and participatory cultures online and the social and political issues around which they assemble."

The authors, who have backgrounds in fields such as Science and Technology Studies (STS), new media studies, and data journalism, explain that their focus in the guide "is less on advancing particular legal or technical fixes, than on facilitating processes of public engagement and democratic deliberation - including provoking curiosity about different ways of seeing the issue and imagination about the different ways in which we might respond."

Chapters 1 ("Mapping Fake News Hotspots on Facebook") and 2 ("Tracing the Circulation of Fake News on the Web") discuss the publics and modes of circulation afforded by digital platforms. Chapter 3 ("Using Tracker Signatures to Map the Techno-Commercial Underpinnings of Fake News Sites") investigates the tracking networks in which online content is embedded and through which its readers are rendered into data. Chapter 4 ("Studying Political Memes on Facebook") analyses the media artifacts that circulate well online, and chapter 5 ("Mapping Troll-Like Practices on Twitter") explores how platform features may be mobilised in the service of attacks directed at political representatives.

The guide is released under a Creative Commons Attribution license to encourage readers to freely copy, translate, redistribute, and reuse the book. All the assets necessary to translate and publish the guide in other languages are available on the Public Data Lab's GitHub page.