pdxbek / misinformation

Word lists for analyzing media reporting

Misinformation

Word lists and R code for analyzing media reporting that were used in @PDXBek’s Information Anarchy: A Survival Guide for the Misinformation Age talk at the 2018 SANS Cyber Threat Intelligence Summit.

What’s Inside The Tin

├── 00-prep.R                              docx to txt conversion via pandoc
├── 01-eda.R                               initial exploratory data analysis
├── 02-explanatory.R                       analysis of 'explanatory' words
├── 03-retractors.R                        analysis of 'retractor' words
├── 04-sourcing.R                          analysis of 'sourcing' words
├── 05-uncertainty.R                       analysis of 'uncertainty' words
├── 06-overall-normalized-comparison.R     normalized cross-sentiment comparison
├── lists                                  "sentiment" word lists for the analyses
└── source-docs                            source documents for the analysis

Each R source file can be run like a normal script, but have specially formatted comments that make it possible to “knit/spin” them into self-contained HTML reports via RStudio. RStudio users can open up the included misinformation.Rproj project to get started.

The “sentiment” n-gram lists used are in the lists directory and the source news documents are in source-docs. There is no need to run the prep script as the docx files have already been converted to plaintext.

While each list can be analyzed independently, a normalized heatmap view can be created with the 06-overall-normalized-comparison.R script (the output of which is below).

ID to Document Name Mapping

doc_id	doc_num	total_words
CNET - How US cybersleuths dec	1	1,327
CNN - DNC hack	2	1,024
IVN - CNN Covering For DNC Cor	3	880
Red Nation- FBI Didn’t Analyze	4	377
The Nation - A New Report Rais	5	5,119
VOA- Think Tank- Cyber Firm at	6	1,430
WaPo - DNC hack	7	1,694