Truth decayMeasuring “iffy” news on social media in time for 2018 election
As the crucial mid-term election approaches, the University of Michigan Center for Social Media Responsibility offers media and the public a tool to help monitor the prevalence of fake news on social media through a Platform Health Metric called the Iffy Quotient.
As the crucial mid-term election approaches, the University of Michigan Center for Social Media Responsibility offers media and the public a tool to help monitor the prevalence of fake news on social media through a Platform Health Metric called the Iffy Quotient.
A web-based dashboard that shows the Iffy Quotient for Facebook and Twitter, dating back to 2016, will be updated regularly.
The Center for Social Media Responsibility is housed in the U-M School of Information. The first report issued by the interdisciplinary center confirms from a deep analysis what was suspected to be true about the 2016 U.S. presidential election: the Iffy Quotient increased dramatically on both social media sites during the election.
It also shows that the two social media platform companies have made progress since early 2017 on their promises to crack down on misinformation, but one has succeeded more than the other.
“We at the School of Information are committed to meeting the intellectual and social challenges of this new era of unregulated public communication via social media. At the Center for Social Media Responsibility, we are working directly with social media companies to produce the designs, systems and metrics to steer social media toward more beneficial discourse,” said Thomas Finholt, dean of the School of Information.
“Contributing to the accountability of social media platforms is one reason why the CSMR was created. This is an important area of focus for our faculty research. Our aim is to serve as a valued resource in the battle against misinformation.”
U-M says that the School of Information announced the center in March to bring together existing campus research expertise to partner with others to address the explosive, unbridled growth of social media and its resulting challenges and opportunities. The center helps media platforms meet their public responsibilities by identifying the challenges, investigating potential solutions and measuring progress.
The Iffy Quotient is the center’s first public measurement tool. It draws data from two external entities: NewsWhip and Media Bias/Fact Check.
