NewsCompare - a novel application for detecting news influence in a country (1904.00712v2)

Abstract: The concept of fake news' has been referenced and thrown around in news reports so much in recent years that it has become a news topic in its own right. At its core, it poses a chilling question -- what do we do if our worldview is fundamentally wrong? Even if internally consistent, what if it does not match the real world? Are our beliefs justified, or could we become indoctrinated from living in abubble'? If the latter is true, how could we even test the limits of said bubble from within its confines? We propose a new method to augment the process of identifying fake news, by speeding up and automating the more cumbersome and time-consuming tasks involved. Our application, NewsCompare takes any list of target websites as input (news-related in our use case, but otherwise not restricted), visits them in parallel and retrieves any text content found within. Web pages are subsequently compared to each other, and similarities are tentatively pointed out. These results can be manually verified in order to determine which websites tend to draw inspiration from one another. The data gathered on every intermediate step can be queried and analyzed separately, and most notably we already use the set of hyperlinks to and from the various websites we encounter to paint a sort of `map' of that particular slice of the web. This map can then be cross-referenced and further strengthen the conclusion that a particular grouping of sites with strong links to each other, and posting similar content, are likely to share the same allegiance. We run our application on the Romanian news websites and we draw several interesting observations.