Week 07 - Finding Links to Misinformation

Topics

This week, we'll find links to misinformation in the tweets that we collected last time.

Last week, we saw that around 38% of tweets contain URLs. The task this week will be to find which of these URLs point to news sources that are unreliable sources of information or misinformation.

To do so, we first need to determine which websites are sources of misinformation. Like the authors of the paper, we will not do this ourselves, but will instead use a list compiled by others. In particular, we'll use the listing at https://iffy.news/iffy-plus/.

Tasks

1. Read https://iffy.news/iffy-plus/ to find details on how they determine if a site is a source of misinformation.

2. Scrape, or otherwise collect the information in the table on the above webpage in order to collect a list of sources of misinformation.

3. Come up with a list of several "fact checking" websites, such as snopes.com, factcheck.org, etc. Aim to have at least three.

4. For each tweet in your collected data that contains a link, determine if the tweet links to a source of misinformation, a fact-checker, or neither. (You'll need to decide what to do if there is more than one link. Is that a common occurrence?)