17:45 - 20:00
Thursday-Panel
Chair/s:
Philippe Mongrain
Discussant/s:
Heike Klüver
Meeting Room M

Franziska Pradel, Fabian Haak, Sven-Oliver Proksch, Philipp Schaer
Measuring a European Public Sphere in Political Online Search

Tom Paskhalis, Kevin Aslett, Cody Buntain, Zhanna Terechshenko, Joshua Tucker, Jonathan Nagler
Learning Media Credibility from Facebook Data

Philippe Mongrain
Citizens as Inadvertent Pollsters? The Effect of Contact Networks on Citizens' Forecasting Skills
Learning Media Credibility from Facebook Data
Tom Paskhalis 1, Kevin Aslett 1, Cody Buntain 2, Zhanna Terechshenko 1, Joshua Tucker 1, Jonathan Nagler 1, Richard Bonneau 1
1 New York University
2 New Jersey Institute of Technology

The production, consumption, and dissemination of online news is of growing interest among scholars studying democracy, but much difficulty lies in the study of news quality in a comparative perspective. Many problems plague cross-country studies, but the phenomenon of media credibility is particularly susceptible to these issues (different political environments, language barriers, etc.). This study leverages a new dataset published by Facebook to study the prevalence of fake news on Facebook across over twenty countries in Europe. We use a supervised model (trained on US data) to predict the credibility of a given news domain based on users’ feedback and behavior. We then analyze the prevalence of unreliable news and the news diet of Facebook users in states of varying democratic quality. We find an East-West divide between countries in Europe with higher proportion of unreliable news in former socialist countries, as well as in the UK. Furthermore, we find that more recently registered news domains and those registered outside of the country are more likely to be the sources of unreliable information.