Can website structure predict fake content?
Dr. Sivan-Sevilla, Dr. Ciampaglia, and Mr. Poudel study the digital ecosystem of news websites through their third-party structure. The Web has democratized access to information and considerably reduced the barriers of entry into the news ecosystem for new players. As a result the news ecosystem has witnessed an explosion of novel news sources. This poses challenges to consumers, who do not always have the tools to determine whether to trust the news source they come across while browsing the Web or scrolling through their social media feed. In particular, the wide spread of unreliable, low-quality, and fraudulent content across the Web calls for a better understanding of the third party structure of both trustworthy and untrustworthy news websites and the business partners that enable the distribution of both low and high quality information online. This work builds on and further develops previous work in the privacy literature that utilized the structure and publicly available attributes related to websites’ third-party requests to test the extent to which the request structure of websites can be used to distinguish between legitimate and fraudulent websites. The goal is to investigate how much the third-party structure of a website is indicative of its operations and quality, going beyond existing approaches that solely rely on the inspection of web content. Such a method could be used to complement current systems and help companies, organizations, and online communities better enforce their own content policies.
