UnNews: An index of unreliable news websites

(Graphic by Isaac Avila Rodriguez)

By Barrett Golding

Misinformation is a thriving industry on the internet, supported by social media shares, advertising dollars and political donations.

In the United States, scores of research reports try to measure how falsehoods spread online. These studies often require lists of untrustworthy “news” sources, but many of these lists have grown out-of-date and incomplete.

Better data means better results for researchers, reporters and readers. So the International Fact-Checking Network built a more complete dataset: UnNews, an index of unreliable news sites.

To create the index, we combined five major lists (see below), then eliminated the sites that were no longer active. We only used lists that were public and curated by established journalists or academics, contained original data (rather than information from other lists), stated their criteria for inclusion and defined how they graded different sites (see our methodology for more).

The index’s initial release relies on the five major lists’ determinations and definitions of “unreliable.” Our next release will include more sites and our the criteria we used for inclusion.

But for now, here are the databases of unreliable news sites that we pulled from to create our index:

• FactCheck.org’s Misinformation Directory (FC), created by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
• Fake News Codex (FN), widely quoted by Snopes and others, maintained by web developer and data designer Chris Herbert.
• OpenSources (OS), run by Merrimack University media studies professor Melissa Zimdars.
• PolitiFact’s Fake News Almanac (PF), by PolitiFact, a joint project of the Tampa Bay Times and Poynter.
• Snopes’ Field Guide to Fake News Sites and Hoax Purveyors (SN), created by Snopes, the oldest and largest online fact-checking organization.

Index | Methodology | Corrections

Index

(Version 1.0, 2018-11-15)