As debate continues over the extent to which “fake news” helped Donald Trump win the presidential race, many have talked about a network of loosely-affiliated, right-wing sites that distributed this content through social media. But few have tried to describe it in scientific terms.
Jonathan Albright, a professor at Elon University in North Carolina, is an expert in data journalism who has worked for both Google and Yahoo. He specializes in media analytics and social networks, and he has created a network map or topology of the fake-news ecosystem.
His research started with a look at the traffic generated by some of the top fake-news distribution sites. As he described in a post published on Medium, he came to the conclusion that banning them from ad networks run by Google or Facebook wouldn’t solve the problem.
That’s because much of the traffic to and from those sites, and therefore their presence at the top of Google’s search engine or high up in the Facebook news feed, is achieved organically, he argued. Many seemed to be driven primarily by sharing through old-fashioned networks such as email.
Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017
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