Resources

General

  • Pandemic Research for Preparedness & Resilience (PREPARE)'s online workshop: SBEG: Social, Behavioral, Economic and Governance Issues during a Pandemic: Session 3 June 25, 2021

  • Knight Foundation - Knight Media Forum 2021

  • CoVaxxy - With the need to vaccinate a large proportion of the population against COVID-19, it is important that the public get accurate information about vaccines. Indiana University, Observatory on Social Media has a dashboard that allows users to visualize relationships between COVID-19 vaccine adoption and online (mis)information.

  • MyWot - free browser extensions, mobile app and API let you check if a website is safe before you reach it, giving a clean and safe browsing environment.

  • Project Vote Smart - Checks voting records, background, and public statements of candidates from around the country.

  • rbutr - rbutr is neutral on all issues and tells you when the webpage you are viewing has been disputed.

  • WorldBrain - A bookmarking service to organize the content of the web to get a well informed perspective rather than a biased or misinformed one on any topic.

  • MediaWell - A web platform to track and distill the latest research on disinformation, online politics, election interference, and emerging collisions between media and democracy.

  • University of Bristol public-facing database of global experts on debunking misinformation at https://sks.to/misinfoexperts .

Media literacy

  • PAUSE - A collection of downloadable assets, including videos, digital stickers, and gifs made to remind people to pause before sharing information via social media.

  • Science Up First - A collective of independent scientists, researchers, health care experts and science communicators working to stop the spread of misinformation around COVID-19.

  • Verified - is an initiative of the United Nations, in collaboration with Purpose, to cut through the noise to deliver life-saving information on COVID-19 and stories from the best of humanity.

  • Shots Heard - is a network of science advocates dedicated to combating anti-vaccine attacks online. The digital cavalry promotes vaccines and fights back against misinformation and harassment by blocking, banning, and reporting the users who spread it.

  • Coursera - COVID-19 Vaccine Ambassador Training - A free training available from Coursera. This training course prepares parents of school-age children, PTAs, community members, and school staff to be Vaccine Ambassadors and promote vaccine acceptance in their communities. After completing the course, Vaccine Ambassadors will be able to share knowledge about COVID-19 and the COVID-19 vaccine, engage in conversations about vaccine hesitancy in a respectful and empathetic way, and direct people to credible sources for further information about COVID-19 vaccines.

Bot Detection

  • Botometer - (formerly BotOrNot) checks the activity of a Twitter account and gives it a score based on how likely the account is to be a bot. Higher scores are more bot-like.

  • Botwiki - tutorials, libraries, frameworks, and other resources for making friendly Twitter bots.

  • BotSociety - Tools for designing and building chat bots.

Disinformation

Disinformation Games

Educational Resources/Teaching Material

  • Lewandowsky, S., & Cook, J. (2020). The Conspiracy Theory Handbook.

  • DRFLab Guidance on Coronavirus Misinformation - Graham Brookie and Andy Carvin of DRFLab give advice in The Atlantic on how to fight off coronavirus misinformation.

  • Making Sense of the News - An online literacy course offered through Stony Brook University's School of Journalism.

  • UProof - An education tool that teaches students how to identify and analyze disinformation while encouraging participation and discussion in the classroom and beyond.

  • Confronting Digital Extremism - An educational tool that consists of four teaching modules, each of which includes a 15-minute video lecture, selected readings, a classroom activity, and supplemental media. The modules are available for free through UCI Open, there is also an introduction and how-to guide with more suggestions for using these resources.

The modules cover four topics of contemporary concern:

  • Case Studies in Disinformation: An introduction to disinformation, how it differs from misinformation and propaganda, and three examples of disinformation campaigns that have been implemented around the world.

  • Trolls and Extremists: A comparative look at so-called Internet "trolls" and digital extremists (both disinformation campaigners and far-right individuals and groups) focused on where their techniques and ideologies converge and diverge. In particular, the circumstances surrounding 2014's #GamerGate afford a window into the blurred boundaries between trolling and extremism.

  • Algorithmic Exploitation: An examination of how digital extremists exploit the technological affordances of social media platforms and search engines, particularly recommendation algorithms. While algorithms alone aren't to blame for digital extremism, understanding the technical aspects of extremists' toolkits is an important step toward developing ways to confront their activities.

  • Toward a New Digital Civics: Proposals for curricula that address the affordances and hazards of participation in the digital media ecosystem. Moving beyond media literacy and fact-checking, this module proposes three strategies for confronting digital extremism that are directed at different stakeholders.


Fact Checking

  • 4Facts - Blockchain based approach to incentivise and reward quality fact checking with tokenised rewards.

  • BitPress - Blockchain approach using journalists and news organisations tagged bad actors and misinformation to score the credibility of content.

  • Dirt Protocol - Blockchain based, wiki-style information and data storage system with token based economic incentives for accurate or correct data additions.

  • Disinformation Toolkit (pdf) - Toolkit to help international organizations initiate a conversation on how disinformation might impact them.

  • Disinformation Index - Developing an objective, metadata based evaluation system to generate a ratings score for media outlets similar to the sort of ratings financial agencies use for companies and countries.

  • Duke Reporter's Lab - Includes a database of global fact-checking sites, which can be viewed as a map or as a list; also includes how they identify fact-checkers.

  • FactCheck.org - FactCheck.org is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania....a nonpartisan, nonprofit “consumer advocate” for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics. We monitor the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players in the form of TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews and news releases.

  • Fact Checker (Washington Post) - The purpose of this Web site, and an accompanying column in the Sunday print edition of The Washington Post, is to “truth squad” the statements of political figures regarding issues of great importance, be they national, international or local.

  • Factmata - Fact checking community, leveraged by artificial intelligence aimed at journalists, media companies, advertisers and platforms.

  • FakerFact - a machine learning system which aims to warn readers when articles show traits which may indicate biases, agendas or other traits associated with misinformation.

  • FakeNewsNet - developed by Arizona State University, is a benchmark dataset that contains news content, social context, and spacial-temporal information for studying fake news on social media.

  • False, Misleading, Clickbait-y, and/or Satirical "News" Sources - Prof. Melissa Zimdar's document is one of the single best resources available for detecting fake news.

  • Flackcheck.org - Headquartered at the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, FlackCheck.org is the political literacy companion site to the award-winning FactCheck.org. The site provides resources designed to help viewers recognize flaws in arguments in general and political ads in particular.

  • International Fact-Checking Network fact-checkers’ code of principles -The International Fact-Checking Network "is a forum for fact-checkers worldwide hosted by the Poynter Institute for Media Studies.

  • List of Fake News Websites – Provided by Wikipedia

  • "Many Americans Believe Fake News is Sowing Confusion" - December 2016 survey from Pew Research Center.

  • Media Bias Ratings - AllSides

  • Michigan Truth Squad - Evaluates the truth and accuracy of Michigan political advertisements. Click on "past calls" to view evaluations of specific advertisements.

  • Museum of Hoaxes - Explores deception, mischief and misinformation throughout history.

  • NiemanLab - Stream of reporting on and data about fake news, misinformation, partisan content, and news literacy.

  • OpenSecrets.org - Nonpartisan, independent and nonprofit, the Center for Responsive Politics is the nation's premier research group tracking money in U.S. politics and its effect on elections and public policy.

  • Politifact - Pulitzer Prize winning site run by editors and reporters from the Tampa Bay Times (Florida) newspaper. "PolitiFact is a fact-checking website that rates the accuracy of claims by elected officials and others who speak up in American politics.... The PolitiFact state sites are run by news organizations that have partnered with the Times." Read about their principles under 'About Us.'

  • Quod - The quod.us project was created to crowdsource the difficult task of identifying and cataloging misinformation published online. You can participate by reporting misinformation you encounter online.

  • Snopes.com - The definitive Internet reference source for urban legends, folklore, myths, rumors, and misinformation.

  • "Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election" - January 2017 research study from Stanford University.

  • Svandis - Blockchain based approach for identifying fake news in the cryptocurrency space.

  • Trive - Global decentralized truth discovery network with incentives for participation.

  • Trusted News - Powered by MetaCert’s MetaCert Protocol, and uses third party resources to assess content as trustworthy or not, and categorise content as satirical, biased, malicious, clickbait or user generated content.

  • TruthOrFiction.com - Fact Checking organization dedicated to unbiased fact checks of news, viral content and social media.

  • Trutheum - Blockchain approach using tokens to incentivise and reward people who ‘help surface the truth’.

Media Watchdogs

Media watchdog groups who attempt to police the news media and check bias. They may operate from their own political bias.

  • AllSides Media Bias Ratings - AllSides Media Bias Ratings helps identify different perspectives so people can know more, understand others, and think for themselves.

  • Credibility Coalition - Construct frameworks that support a collaborative, interdisciplinary approach to assessing, scaling, and implementing information quality online.

  • Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) - FAIR, the national media watch group, has been offering well-documented criticism of media bias and censorship since 1986.

  • Hamilton 2.0 Dashboard - The Hamilton 2.0 dashboard, a project of the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, provides a summary analysis of the narratives and topics promoted by the Russian government and Russian state-funded media on Twitter, YouTube, broadcast television (RT), and state-sponsored news websites.

  • Media Matters for America - Media Matters for America is a Web-based, not-for-profit, progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.

  • Media Research Center - MRC’s sole mission is to expose and neutralize the propaganda arm of the Left: the national news media. This makes the MRC’s work unique within the conservative movement.

  • NewsGuard - Experienced journalists research online news brands to help readers and viewers know which ones are trying to do legitimate journalism.

  • Our.News - Website which allows the public to evaluate news articles.

  • ProPublica - Is an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest.

Talks on Videos