Proposal: Expand Audit of Online Information Propagation to Diverse Sources

Proposals Round 8
#1

Name of Project: Arbiter Report

One-line Summary

Allow anyone external to a platform to evaluate the spread of online news examining which accounts spread it, when they spread it, and how much interest it garnered–all at the click of a button.

Description

Expand our previously created auditing proof-of-concept for journalists hosted at https://parrot.report into a real-time dashboard that allows us to study more news outlets for a month (or for as long as funds can support us).

Previous Grant

We received two previous grants to create a dashboard linked above to study what information is spread online and how it spreads and partnered with The Times / The Sunday Times (UK) to verify if there was any coordinated activity surrounding the spread of news from two Russian state-backed media outlets (that had been banned multiple times by the EU, USA, Meta, and others).

Now it is not correct to consider any single authority as a constant, neutral arbiter, especially in a war. And our system is designed to be source-agnostic. So we would like to expand to other news sources, focusing on objective metrics around news sharing before we dive deeper into content analysis.

Proposed Extension Details

Create a website at https://arbiter.report where we will host an expanded version of the parrot proof-of-concept dashboard that will contain a more diverse set of content than just the 2 Russian sites, with an initial set sourced from https://iffy.news

Grant Deliverables:

  • Next.js website hosted at https://arbiter.report
  • Metrics similar to those found on the proof-of-concept Parrot dashboard
  • Seed set of reports on sites from iffy news

Squad

Squad Lead:

  • Twitter: @swapneel_mehta
  • Discord: swapneelm#8582
  • USDC ETH mainnet wallet address: 0xA516953726AD7598C889B69572CFf00025A6763a

Squad members:

Jay Gala, Deep Gandhi, Jhagrut Lalwani, Dhara Mungra, Raghav Jain

1 Like
#2

Interesting. I like this idea since it has become pretty hard to find non-propaganda in the news nowadays but how what kind of metric do you use to determine if a news is fake? Since if you just have a decentralized/random method, the country that outputs the most propaganda would be the news I think but let me know what you think.

#3

Thank you! So I should probably update the definition because we explicitly don’t try to determine if news is fake or not. I think that’s a rabbit hole because there’s so much missing context, differing perspectives, and general gray areas that make it a nearly-impossible task.

Instead, the point of the metrics we provide is to help those that do work on detecting and evaluating fake news have a quantitative understanding of its spread. We’re hoping to expand beyond the small proof-of-concept we carried out on somewhat known Russian outlets that have been attack vectors for disinformation campaigns in the past exactly to address the point you raise around studying more countries and outlets.

Linking our past two proposals for context and associated discussions:

Round 7

Round 5

#4

I just want to share https://www.improvethenews.org/ which might be interested for you to consider or collaborate with.