Saturday 3 June 2017

Fake News, Daily Telegraph, Oxford Internet Institute, #ge2017

No tweet response to previous questions but I think I have found the source research doc.

http://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/89/2017/06/Junk-News-and-Bots-during-the-2017-UK-General-Election.pdf

Junk News and Bots during the 2017 UK General Election: What Are UK Voters Sharing Over Twitter? COMPROP DATA MEMO 2017.5 / 31 MAY 2017

For me this from the conclusion is the interesting bit-

Content about the Labour Party tended to feature prominently among the election traffic on Twitter. The level of automation was roughly equal across the Conservative Party, Labour Party, Liberal Democrats and UKIP, however highly automated accounts tweeting about the Labour Party were more productive in spreading content. Overall though, automated accounts generate a relatively small amount, 12.3%, of the total content being shared about the UK election.

So how can this become a front page story in the Daily Telegraph headlined "Fake web accounts boosting Labour vote" ?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/06/01/exclusive-labour-election-campaign-boosted-fake-twitter-accounts/

No direct link mentioned in the print version of the story. No Twitter connections to the source of the paper.

btw " Blogs and websites dedicated to citizen journalism," included under "other", after Professional News Outlets so I feel less excluded now. Sometimes the way that bloggers appear in newspapers / academic writing can be a cause for concern but anyway back on topic

Now located some Twitter connections

John D. Gallacher Oxford University john.gallacher@cybersecurity.ox.ac.uk @john_gallacher1 Monica Kaminska Oxford University monica.kaminska@cybersecurity.ox.ac.uk @monica_kaminska Bence Kollanyi Oxford University bence.kollanyi@oii.ox.ac.uk @bencekollanyi Philip N. Howard Oxford University philip.howard@oii.ox.ac.uk @pnhoward

So my question is, has the news so far reported the research accurately? should there be further comment?

This is the weekend so maybe not much can happen till Monday, but sometime before Thursday would seem appropriate.

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