A Field Guide to Fake News: A Collection of Recipes for Those Who Love to Cook with Digital Methods (Chapters 1-3)

Abstract

The Field Guide to Fake News explores the use of digital methods to trace the production, circulation and reception of "fake news" online. This document is a sample comprising of the first three chapters of the field guide. These chapters cover recipes for tracing the circulation of "fake news" on Facebook and the web, as well as its tracker signatures and techno-commercial underpinnings. Further chapters on how to map and investigate memes as vectors of "post-truth" politics and political trolling will be released in the coming months. The field guide is a project of the Public Data Lab with support from First Draft and has been produced through a series of "data sprints" and research workshops in Amsterdam, Copenhagen and Milan.

Keywords: fake news, post-truth, online misinformation, digital methods, digital sociology, internet studies, meme studies, trolling practices