As an effort to control the spread of fake news on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, Scientists have developed a tool to help monitor the spreading of fake news which encourages cybercrime. This tool is developed by the researchers at the University Of Michigan in the United States. The tool works using a Platform Health Metric called the Iffy Quotient, which draws the data from two of the external entities NewsWhip and Media Bias/Fact Checker.
NewsWhip is a social media engagement tracking firm, it collects URLs on thousands of websites every day and after that, it gathers information on which of these sites have engagement on Facebook and Twitter platforms. Iffy Quotients queries NewsWhip for the 5,000 top and most popular URLs on these two social media platforms. After that. The tool checks, if the domain names are flagged by Media Bias/ Fact Check, an independent website which arranges various sources based on the reliability and bias.
This tool divides the URLs into three categories, these are based on the Media Bias/Fact Checklist: ‘Iffy’ if the website is on a questionable source or a conspiracy list and ‘Ok’ if the website is on the other list such as Left-Bias and Right-Bias or the Satire; ‘Unknown’ if it is not on any of the lists. The first report issued by the researchers confirms what was doubted about the 2016 US presidential election: the Iffy Quotient increased dramatically on both Facebook and Twitter during the election. It also shows the both of the companies have progressed since 2017 on their promise to control the spreading of misinformation. But, one has succeeded more.
The Twitter Iffy Quotient has not lowered much and it is still nearly twice its level in early 2016. Facebook and Twitter Iffy coefficients were roughly comparable in most of 2018 but Facebook’s is now somewhat lower.
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