Researchers from the University of Michigan in the US, in October 2018, developed a web-based tool to monitor fake news on social networking services such as Twitter and Facebook.
The tool uses ‘Iffy Quotient’, a Platform Health Metric, which draws data from two external entities: NewsWhip and Media Bias/ Fact Check. The Iffy Quotient is the fraction of popular Universal Resource Locators (URLs) that come from ‘iffy’ sites—iffy is a whimsical way of referring to sites that often carry misinformation.
Working Methodology The NewsWhip, a social media engagement tracking firm, collects URLs from hundreds of thousands of websites each day. It then checks if these sites have engagements on Facebook and Twitter.
The Iffy Quotient queries NewsWhip for the top 5,000 most popular URLs on both of these social media platforms.
Then the tool identifies the domain names that have been marked by Media Bias/ Fact Check. Media Bias/ Fact Check is a website that rates factual accuracy and political bias in news media.
Based on the media bias and fact checklists, the tool divides the URLs into three categories: ‘Iffy’, if the site is on the Questionable Sources or Conspiracy lists; ‘OK’, if the site is on any other list, such as Left-Bias, Right-Bias, or Satire; and ‘Unknown’, if not on any list.
The first report after research confirmed what was suspected about the 2016 US presidential election: the Iffy Quotient increased markedly on both Facebook and Twitter during the elections. It also showed Twitter and Facebook to have made progress since early 2017 on their promises to stop the spread of misinformation, but one company succeeded more than the other.
The Facebook Iffy Quotient has seen a steady drop since early 2017 and has now returned to its early 2016 levels, but the Twitter Iffy Quotient has not shown much of a slump and is still nearly twice its early 2016 level.
Through most of 2018, Facebook and Twitter Iffy coefficients were roughly equivalent but that of Facebook is somewhat lower now.
The difference between Facebook and Twitter is even more striking in an engagement-weighted version of the Iffy Quotient, which can be taken as a rough proxy for the fraction of total user attention.