Hoaxy: A Platform for Tracking Online Misinformation

TL;DR

Hoaxy is a platform designed to track, analyze, and understand the spread of online misinformation and fact-checking efforts on social media, revealing temporal and user activity patterns.

Contribution

This paper introduces Hoaxy, a novel platform for collecting and analyzing online misinformation and fact-checking, providing insights into their dissemination dynamics.

Findings

Fact-checking lags misinformation by 10-20 hours

Fake news is spread mainly by very active users

Fact checking is more grassroots and less dominated by highly active users

Abstract

Massive amounts of misinformation have been observed to spread in uncontrolled fashion across social media. Examples include rumors, hoaxes, fake news, and conspiracy theories. At the same time, several journalistic organizations devote significant efforts to high-quality fact checking of online claims. The resulting information cascades contain instances of both accurate and inaccurate information, unfold over multiple time scales, and often reach audiences of considerable size. All these factors pose challenges for the study of the social dynamics of online news sharing. Here we introduce Hoaxy, a platform for the collection, detection, and analysis of online misinformation and its related fact-checking efforts. We discuss the design of the platform and present a preliminary analysis of a sample of public tweets containing both fake news and fact checking. We find that, in the aggregate, the sharing of fact-checking content typically lags that of misinformation by 10--20 hours. Moreover, fake news are dominated by very active users, while fact checking is a more grass-roots activity. With the increasing risks connected to massive online misinformation, social news observatories have the potential to help researchers, journalists, and the general public understand the dynamics of real and fake news sharing.