Launched in 2018, the Digital Forensics Initiative is part of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. Led by Dr. Jonathan Albright, this initiative will explore the complex interface between news, data, and impacts through applied forensics, data reporting, network analysis, and observational and situational study. The intention is for the program to act as a resource for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers by providing timely scholarly analysis, evidence-based insights, data resources, and critical commentary through applied media analytics.
The goal of this initiative is to promote better understanding for improved reporting, research, and policy decisions. This involves in-depth investigation of the mechanisms affecting the reception, retention, and impact of information and topics in the news through a multidisciplinary, mixed methods, and computational social science approach. While the focus of the Digital Forensics Initiative involves the analysis and collection of data related to political messaging and digital campaigning, important themes and questions we seek to study include:
- What are the pathways that tend to increase and/or decrease the salience and resultant impact (i.e., behaviors and attitudes) of information online?
- What are the relative shapes of the networked information spheres and relationship structures of actors involved in politics, healthcare, science, business, entertainment, and popular culture?
- What is the relationship between bias and impact in the dissemination of information between different sources and platforms? Where do comparative differences exist, and do they matter?
- Where does the least reliable (and most biased) information tend to circulate the most? What are the key mechanisms and distribution vectors through which this process occurs?
- What are the themes in the amplification tactics involving information related to issue controversies, political debates, social activism, and other topics of high salience?
- What roles do platforms and legacy media play in the spread of unreliable information? What are the roles of professional journalists, institutional media, and independent media?
- Where (and how) do automation and inauthentic participation affect the pathways through which people are exposed to and/or are more likely to encounter certain types of information?
- What roles do content personalization, ideological preferences, geographic- and demographic-based targeting, and preferred delivery channel(s) play in the types of information people encounter?
Project lead: Jonathan Albright
Until late 2016, there was very limited awareness that engagement with online misinformation was growing dramatically, due to a lack of visibility about news content consumption online. More recently, there has been extensive work to classify and then map out the misinformation ecosystem but there is yet to be a good way to evaluate if the ecosystem is getting "healthier"—or getting worse. This understanding is crucial for knowing when misinformation is becoming prevalent in order to ensure that there are sufficient resources to address it. It's also important for informing media researchers, policy makers, and technologists who are experimenting with ways to incentivize the production and consumption of accurate news.
To address this need, this project focuses on developing an analysis framework for measuring changes in the news and misinformation ecosystem over time. There are two main challenges with this sort of large scale analysis: automated (and even semi-automated) classification of content is difficult and external parties have limited access to platform or publisher consumption data. This project can use a coarse classification and aggregated data sources to mitigate these challenges enough to provide actionable insights. This work will be structured such that it can be extended as classification approaches improve and as more data becomes available.
Project lead: Aviv Ovadya
This project investigates and intervenes in the immigrant Chinese news ecosystem, which has seen significant misinformation, to bridge the information silos between Chinese-speaking immigrants and their surrounding community. In collaboration with Alhambra Source, a trilingual civic news site serving the immigrant majority city of Alhambra, and Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Los Angeles, this project monitors ethnic Chinese media and social media outlets, and engages community members to produce and distribute bridging stories.
Project lead: Chi Zhang
How does a Facebook-led partnership of news organizations and fact-checkers mix algorithmic and editorial judgment to fight “fake news”? Through interviews with key personnel and analyses of documents and infrastructures, this project tells the story of how techno-journalistic platforms make facts. A better understanding of such hybrids helps scholars, technologists, journalists, and audiences appreciate how to trust and critique news networks—and how to think about and reconfigure power between publishers and platforms.
Project lead: Mike Ananny
The report analyzes the bad practices used by online media sites which propagate hoaxes, questionable claims, and rumors sourced on social media to achieve widespread circulation or refrain from debunking and correcting falsehoods. One of the most important debunking strategies is to provide a counternarrative with new facts. Craig Silverman’s extraordinary success in spotlighting fake news for BuzzFeed flowed directly from his work as a Tow Fellow and this 2015 Tow Center report.
Project lead: Craig Silverman
This project—the first in a suite of tools for consumers of news on social media—will build an open database of popular news sources on Facebook, illustrating their reach across platforms, surfacing data about the owners, advertising networks, authors, and affiliations. This will take the form of a user-friendly public website, as well as an API so other developers can build tools that use this database to illuminate the murky world of partisan news on social media. This project aims to empower the public to be more responsible about the news they share with their networks, as well as increase media literacy around online news sources.
Project lead: John Keegan