What a Map of the Fake-News Ecosystem Says About the Problem; Fortune, 11/28/16

Matthew Ingram, Fortune; What a Map of the Fake-News Ecosystem Says About the Problem:

"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 platforms. 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 that describes the landscape of the fake-news ecosystem...

More than anything, the impression one gets from looking at Albright’s network map is that there are some extremely powerful “nodes” or hubs that propel a lot of the traffic involving fake news. And it also shows an entire universe of sites that many people have probably never heard of...

With the landscape of the fake-news ecosystem outlined in terms of the connections between the various nodes, it may be easier for platforms like Google and Facebook—or even for other media outlets—to track the spread of the problem and come up with potential solutions."