Ebook
A Field Guide to Fake News and Other Information Disorders
Public Data Lab, edited by Liliana Bounegru, Jonathan Gray, Tommaso Venturini, and Michele Mauri
Research recipes for tracing how false content, memes, and trolling circulate, from a 2018 academic collaboration with First Draft. Openly licensed and intellectually rich; most recipes depend on platform data access that has since closed.
Produced by a consortium of universities with First Draft, the field guide gives methods and recipes for studying the circulation of fake news on Facebook and the web, political memes, and trolling practices and their commercial underpinnings, using digital methods. It is for digitally confident students, journalists, and researchers, and it is a large PDF.
From 2018 and unchanged. Many recipes used platform APIs and tools that have since shut down, so treat them as method descriptions rather than runnable steps.
Worth it if
- You research information disorder academically or for long-form journalism
- You want methods for mapping circulation, not just verifying one item
- You can adapt a recipe to whatever data access exists today
Skip it if
- You want practical verification for daily work
- You expect to run the recipes as written
What is inside
- 01
Tracing fake news on Facebook and the web
Recipes for following the spread of specific stories across pages and sites.
- 02
Political memes
Methods for studying how memes move and mutate.
- 03
Trolling practices
Tracing trolling and the commercial structures behind it.
What you will be able to do
- Design a study of how a false claim spread
- Describe the data you would need and where it used to come from
- Read the information-disorder literature with its methods in view
How current it is
A single 2018 version. The publishing lab is active, but the recipes predate the platform API shutdowns of 2018 to 2024 and cannot be reproduced as written.
- Updated
- January 2018
- Maintained
- Archived
How to get the most from it
- 01
Read for design, not execution
Ask what each recipe was trying to measure, then find today's data path.
- 02
Pair it with the 2020 Verification Handbook
That edition covers the practical side of the same problem.
Strengths
- Openly licensed
- Rigorous methods
- A serious academic consortium
Limitations
- Recipes outdated by API closures
- Huge file
- Academic register
Pair it with
FAQ
Questions, answered
Which licence is it?
The Zenodo record and project site say CC BY 4.0. An editor's announcement said share-alike. Treat the Zenodo statement as authoritative.
Why is the file so large?
It is a designed, image-heavy book. Download it once and keep it.
Learned the method? Practise it on real data
The resources above teach the craft. When you want to run real lookups across breach, people, domain, and crypto sources without opening a dozen vendor accounts, that is what SearchIn is for.
- Free account, no card
- Credits never expire
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