When evaluating the credibility of a news story, the first question to ask is: Can you trust the source?
To help fight fake news, we are releasing an index of untrustworthy sources. We merged the major curated fake-news site lists, then purged those sites no longer active, making this the most complete, up-to-date catalog of fake-news sites on the web.
The table has each site's domain name, the number of lists that include the site, its Alexa rank, its year online (from DomainBigData), and either a ✔ or the assigned tag ("fake", "clickbait", etc.) if the site was on these fake-news lists:
- FactCheck.org's Websites that Post Fake and Satirical Stories (FC)
- Fake News Codex (FNC)
- Fake News Watch (FNW)
- OpenSources.co (OS)
- PolitiFact's Fake News Almanac (PFA)
- Snopes' Field Guide to Fake News Sites and Hoax Purveyors (SNP)
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:
- Who funds fake news?
- How fake news whack-a-molests the web/
- Can advertisers fight fake news and ad fraud?
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.
Methodology
Definitions of the above site classifications are at the Fake News Codex, the Fake News Watch (now defunct: link goes to Internet Archive), 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 1,112 unique domain names. Of these, the 622 above were still active and 486 (44 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.
Our next step is to try to keep this list dynamic, automatically expanding it by following 301 redirects, many of which lead to new fake-news sites. We'll also harvest fake-news connected domains by tracked 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.
Reveal thanks 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.