Glossary
Key terms and concepts in Junkipedia.
Last updated
Key terms and concepts in Junkipedia.
Last updated
Actor is our generic term for all the different entities in the world who are communicating online, like organizations, people, companies, institutions, campaigns, community groups and so on. Actors own and operate online communications across different platforms, like Facebook accounts, TikTok accounts, YouTube channels, Telegram channels, and podcast feeds for example. Actors communicate across all these channels in coordinated and complex ways.
Junkipedia allows you to , so you avoid missing important parts of their overall story.
Let’s look at an example.
When using Junkipedia text search features, the "boolean operators" option allows symbolic logic expressions to be used. With this option following logical operators are supported:
| signifies OR operation
( and ) signify precedence
- signifies NOT operation
" quotes a literal string to signify a phrase for searching
To use these operators, consider a sample database containing the following records:
A.) lions and tigers and bears
B.) snakes and lizards and bears
C.) bears and snakes
The following search string using the AND operation would yield results B & C.
snakes + bears
The following search string using the OR operation would yield results A & B.
lions | lizards
The following search string combines the above operations with parenthetical groupings and yields results A & B.
lions | (snakes + lizards)
The following search string using the NOT operator yields A & C.
- lizards
The following search string using literal quotes yields A & B.
"and bears"
In Junkipedia, an issue is a collection of information about a piece of tracked content. This content arrives to Junkipedia as a tip which generates an issue if it is if the tip is approor automated monitoring system. When the same piece of content is received multiple times, each source is tracked in the issue. Issues are specific to a network and can only be seen by other users in the same network.
See Tip-Issue-Narrative Pipeline for an explanation of the relationship between tips, issues, and narratives.
In the context of the Crowdtangle and Junkipedia social media monitoring systems, a list (a.k.a. monitoring list) refers to a list of content collection criteria. The criteria can include social media platforms, specific channels on those platforms, and specific search terms.
A list group (aka group list) is a container that allow multiple lists to be grouped together in a nested fashion like a computer file folder. This allows you to provide structure to your collection of lists when organizing a large number of them. For more details on this feature, see .
The Junkipedia monitoring system allows you to describe content you are interested in collecting from social media platforms without having to go directly to those platforms for updates. Instead, you can set up a feeds that periodically collect data from the platforms and let you view it within Junkipedia.
In Junkipedia, a narrative is a false or misleading story first noticed in one tip and tracked across multiple tips and issues as the story spreads through social media.
Misinformation News Monitoring
Election Protection
Junkipedia relates users from the same organization or team by linking their individual user accounts to an organization account.
A saved search stores pre-defined search criteria in the system. This allows you to come back to a complex search query for future use and allows to assign a search query to an automated process. For more details on this feature, see Creating Saved Search Alerts
See Tip-Issue-Narrative Pipeline for an explanation of the relationship between tips, issues, and narratives.
A person using an online service such as Junkipedia or a social media platform is often referred to as a user. If the service can only be used with a registered identity, that identity is often established with a user account.
Our actor will be . McCallian has 5 channels being tracked in Junkipedia: accounts on , , , and .
Actors are added to Junkipedia through .
Actor sets are collections of common (like people and organizations) that , provided by Junkipedia.
For example, is an actor set that includes politicians as actors—in fact, all the incumbents and candidates who ran for federal office in 2024 in the US House, Senate, and for President.
In Junkipedia, you can across all of the channels belonging to all of the actors in an actor set. With the actor set for example, you can see, and filter and these posts in all kinds of useful ways.
Every actor set has a set of attributes that describe and categorize its actors, allowing you to filter and compare within the group. For example, the actor set has many attributes. It has an attribute called ‘Registered Political Party’, which allows you to filter down to see . It has another attribute, ‘State’, which allows you to filter down to look at , for example. There is a lot of flexibility in how you can combine and compare these attributes, and also export the data for your extended analysis.
Currently, new actor sets are being added by the Junkipedia team, however we know that many researchers have their own actor sets they would like to use and share through Junkipedia. Please if you have actor sets you would like to load into the system, as we are hoping to trial this new feature in the coming months.
Junkipedia allows you to subscribe to alert notifications when new matching pre-defined search criteria become available to you in the system. For more details on this feature, see Creating Saved Search Alerts.
+ signifies AND operation ()
A specific source of is often called a channel. A channel can be as simple as all public posts from a specific social media user identity or something more complex that multiple users can selectively contribute to.
In the context of social media , or websites in general, content refers to information shared in any of the various forms supported by the platform such as images, video, text, and links to other content.
In the context of social media , engagement is
In the context of social media a feed is a series of that have been algorithmically placed in a queue for the user's consumption.
can influence the appearing in their by subscribing to that they wish to follow. In many cases, it is possible to view the relationships between channels and their followers. Great attention is paid to the number of users following a specific channels as an metric.
A means of referring to a specific piece of online such as a web page or .
A network is a group of that share a focus. When organizations are added, Junkipedia staff members assign them to the appropriate networks. Network examples include:
In the context of Junkipedia, a social media platform is a service such as Facebook or Twitter that allows people to post and share information (aka ) online.
A unit of shared via a social media platform.
Junkipedia users can be assigned roles that determine privileges they have within the system. See for specific role options.
A tag is a term used to uniformly assign a specific meaning to items in the database. For example, the term "covid-19" is used as a tag assigned to relevant to the Covid 19 pandemic. Multiple users have collaboratively standardized on the use of this tag to eliminate questions about which of several synonymous terms should be used to identify this topic.
Tips refer to content on social media that someone suspects to be problematic. Tips can be submitted by Junkipedia by or by anyone using .
Tiplines make it easy for anyone to report problematic content. People can submit to Junkipedia through a tipline without having to set up an account and logging into the system. . Organizations using Junkipedia can create tiplines to be shared with their constituents via web forms, SMS, and other media.
