Poynter List of 515 Unreliable (Read: Conservative) News Sources

UnNews: An index of unreliable news websites

By Barrett Golding

Misinformation is a thriving industry on the internet, supported by social media shares, advertising dollars and political donations.

In the United States, scores of research reports try to measure how falsehoods spread online. These studies often require lists of untrustworthy “news” sources, but many of these lists have grown out-of-date and incomplete.

Better data means better results for researchers, reporters and readers. So the International Fact-Checking Network built a more complete dataset: UnNews, an index of unreliable news sites.

To create the index, we combined five major lists (see below), then eliminated the sites that were no longer active. We only used lists that were public and curated by established journalists or academics, contained original data (rather than information from other lists), stated their criteria for inclusion and defined how they graded different sites (see our methodology for more).

The index’s initial release relies on the five major lists’ determinations and definitions of “unreliable.” Our next release will include more sites and our the criteria we used for inclusion.

But for now, here are the databases of unreliable news sites that we pulled from to create our index:

• FactCheck.org’s Misinformation Directory (FC), created by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
• Fake News Codex (FN), widely quoted by Snopes and others, maintained by web developer and data designer Chris Herbert.
• OpenSources (OS), run by Merrimack University media studies professor Melissa Zimdars.
• PolitiFact’s Fake News Almanac (PF), by PolitiFact, a joint project of the Tampa Bay Times and Poynter.
• Snopes’ Field Guide to Fake News Sites and Hoax Purveyors (SN), created by Snopes, the oldest and largest online fact-checking organization.

Index | Methodology | Corrections

Index

The next phase of the project will be to automatically remove inactive sites, add sites by following URL redirects (which often lead to new fake news schemes) and harvest related domains.

For example, notorious conspiracy site YourNewsWire.com now redirects to NewsPunch.com to attempt to avoid detection by fact-checkers and the platforms. The SpyOnWeb research tool detects the relationship between misinformation sites, along with other domains connected by IP address or Google Analytics and AdSense ID (see Bellingcat’s site research guide for more on these tools).

Blacklisting bots, fraud and false-news sites

Fake news is a business. Much of that business is ad-supported.

Advertisers don’t want to support publishers that might tar their brand with hate speech, falsehoods or some kinds of political messaging — but too often, they have little choice in the matter.

Most ad-tech dashboards make it hard for businesses to prevent their ads from appearing on (and funding) disreputable sites. Marketers can create blacklists, but many of those lists have been out-of-date or incomplete.

Aside from journalists, researchers and news consumers, we hope that the UnNews index will be useful for advertisers that want to stop funding misinformation.

Methodology

Our index compiles existing site lists, curated by academic and journalists. For now, we depend on their expertise for accuracy. (A protocol to review and add sites is in the works.)

The site tags above come from those assigned by the original list curators. We grouped their differing labels into our set of six tags.