This investigation builds on work In working with their students that Bounegru and Gray did with First Draft, a nonprofit that works with journalists to support investigations around misinformation. They analyzed the tracker signatures of mainstream news sites alongside those of junk news sites to understand their different monetization and audience economics practices.
As a result of their investigations, the
researchers created A Field Guide to phone number list Fake News that explores how digital methods can be used to study false viral news, political memes, and trolling practices. “It became widely used by a network of hundreds of media organizations and fact checking groups as well as for training people doing investigative work on disinformation,” Gray said. Together with other collaborators at the Public Data Lab which they co-founded, and Gray wrote a paper in New Media & Society about the threat of misleading junk news on social, economic and political life and the questions that it raises about social media and online content sharing platforms.
Gray has long been interested in the
politics of open and public data and is writing the fleet attacked the french a book on the subject. This involves tracing how open data policies and practices have developed around the world, and he said it’s been valuable to be able to search and analyze open data websites through the Wayback Machine. As part of research for the book he published an article in Data & Policy, from Cambridge University Press, about the rise of data portals as online devices for making data public.
“In the case of data portals such as data
.gov.uk we see a shift from more sociable and experimental design approaches aiming to surface
questions, engage communities and support cultures of socially oriented invention to more muted, minimal expert facing infrastructures,” said Gray. “It could be considered a certain kind of success for open data advocates that portals have become so established and institutionalized, but also suggests that maybe there’s less interest in being inclusive,accessible, responsive or thoughtful in reaching communities that may be less technically oriented or those who don’t already know what they are looking for or what kinds of data is likely to be found.
both Bounegru and Gray share ways that
the Internet Archive can be useful for research. Through hands-on research activities with the Wayback Machine they explore how it can show how web content, user interfaces and web categories change. It can even provide evidence of broader societal change, such as how political views have shifted over time. The Archive can reveal large-scale consumer data changes and allow researchers, journalists,
students and community groups to In working with their students gain a richer appreciation of digital media history.
Added Bounegru: “We use the Internet Archive a lot. It is an essential tool for our research.”