Fake-news, news-satire, clickbait, and hate sites
Goals
- Compile the most complete, up-to-date list of active fake-news sites.
- Make the list dynamic, auto-adding new sites and removing inactive ones.
- Build a blacklist for advertisers to keep their ads off bogus sites.
1. The list
When evaluating the credibility of a news story, your first step is: Consider the source?
To help fight fake news, we have released this index of untrustworthy sources. We made it by merging the major curated fake-news site lists, then purging those sites no longer active.
The table below has each site's domain name, Alexa rank, and any tags (fake, clickbait, etc.) assigned by, with links to, the fake-news lists that included the site:
- FactCheck.org's Websites that Post Fake and Satirical Stories (FC)
- Fake News Codex (FN)
- OpenSources.co
- PolitiFact's Fake News Almanac (PF)
- Snopes' Field Guide to Fake News Sites and Hoax Purveyors (SN)
2. Auto-updates
The next phase is to automate this list, dynamically removing inactive site and adding new ones by following 301 redirects, many of which lead to new fake-news sites. We'll also harvest fake-news connected domains by tracking their shared Google Analytics and AdSense IDs. For instance, here's SpyOnWeb's related domains for yournewswire.com, the infamous disseminater of clickbait and conspiracies.
3. Blacklist bot, fraud and false-news sites
Fake news is a business. Much of that business is ad-supported. Most advertisers don't want to support these shady sites, but they often have no choice.
Right now it's nearly impossible for business owners to prevent their ads from appearing on (and funding) shady sites. When making ad buys, marketers can enter blacklists in their ad-tech dashboards. But these lists have always been out-of-date and incomplete. Until now: A dynamically updated list, such as ours, could generate an accurate, current blacklist allowing advertisers to stop supporting bogus sites.
Corrections?
If you have additions or corrections, please notify us with the form below. Remember, our list only incldues sites whose stories are demonstrably fake – not merely biased or partisan. Send links to fact-checks demonstrating whether the site you'd like us to review publishes fact-based or fake news.
How we're using the data
Compiling this data taught us lots about the fake-news business. We're using the list to find out:
Methodology
Definitions of the above site classifications are at the Fake News Codex, OpenSources.co, and PolitiFact.
Our Google spreadsheet has additional data, including sites' location, title, number of scripts each site uses for advertising and tracking, along with averages for individual factors and correlations between factors.
The combined lists had 1,125 unique domain names. Of these, the 548 above were still active and 577 (51 percent) inactive, either no longer registered or no longer posting stories. We found the inactive sites by retrieving HTTP status codes (404s or 301s) and, in some cases, by visually inspection (using auto-generated screenshots to determine which to inspect).
We curated the resulting list, trimming it a bit, by removing several sites whose stories, though highly partisan, were mostly not fake: alternet.org, cato.org, heritage.org, nationalreview.com, thedailybeast.com, theintercept.com, thinkprogress.org, and weeklystandard.com. We confirmed this by checking their stories at PolitiFact and Snopes.
Several sites we reviewed had mostly false fact-check judgments. These stayed on the list: addictinginfo.org, dailycaller.com, dailykos.com, and judicialwatch.org.
We thank all the people who compiled and curated the lists from which we pulled data. Special kudos to Professor Melissa Zimdars of Merrimack College who led the Herculean assembly at OpenSources.