Title: The Junk News Aggregator: Examining junk news posted on Facebook, starting with the 2018 US Midterm Elections,
Abstract: In recent years, the phenomenon of online misinformation and junk news
circulating on social media has come to constitute an important and widespread
problem affecting public life online across the globe, particularly around
important political events such as elections. At the same time, there have been
calls for more transparency around misinformation on social media platforms, as
many of the most popular social media platforms function as "walled gardens,"
where it is impossible for researchers and the public to readily examine the
scale and nature of misinformation activity as it is unfolding on the
platforms. In order to help address this, this paper, we present the Junk News
Aggregator, an interactive web tool made publicly available, which allows the
public to examine, in near real-time, all of the public content posted to
Facebook by important junk news sources in the US. It allows the public to gain
access to and examine the latest articles posted on Facebook (the most popular
social media platform in the US and one where content is not readily accessible
at scale from the open Web), as well as organise them by time, news publisher,
and keywords of interest, and sort them based on all eight engagement metrics
available on Facebook. Therefore, the Aggregator allows the public to gain
insights on the volume, content, key themes, and types and volumes of
engagement received by content posted by junk news publishers, in near real
time, hence opening up and offering transparency in these activities, at scale
across the top most popular junk news publishers and in near real time. In this
way, the Aggregator can help increase transparency around the nature, volume,
and engagement with junk news on social media, and serve as a media literacy
tool for the public.