A new social media tool out of the University of Michigan measures how much of the news circulating on media platforms - like Twitter or Facebook - is reliable.
Researchers call it the “iffy” quotient - measuring how many links and stories circulating on an online platform lead to questionable materials.
Tom Finholt is the Dean of the School of Information at
U of M. He said the tool checks URLs of news articles on a site against Media Bias Fact Checker.
“And they basically focus on the not very reliable segment of those URLs and they compute the proportion of circulating URLs on say facebook or twitter that are of that type.”
Finholt said from there it’s easy to see how much unreliable news is circulating on a platform.
He said the tool shows iffy content increased around the 2016 election - facebook peaked at close to 8 percent questionable content.
“And then what you see in the case of Facebook is a pretty steady decline over the period from January 2017 to present.”
Finholt said twitter, on the other hand, has stayed consistent - hovering at about five- percent iffy content.
He said the tool offers a way for social media sites to see how effective they are in their attempts to curb fake content.