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 channels 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 monitor all of an actor’s channels, so you avoid missing important parts of their overall story.
Let’s look at an example.
Our actor will be Randi McCallian, 2024 candidate for the US House of Representatives. McCallian has 5 channels being tracked in Junkipedia: accounts on Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube and Instagram.
Actors are added to Junkipedia through actor sets.
Actor sets are collections of common actors (like people and organizations) that you can use as free starting points for your research, provided by Junkipedia.
For example, US Politicians - Federal 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 see the latest online activity across all of the channels belonging to all of the actors in an actor set. With the actor set US Politicians - Federal for example, you can see the online posts with the most engagement across all these politicians in the last week, and filter and chart 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 US Politicians - Federal actor set has many attributes. It has an attribute called ‘Registered Political Party’, which allows you to filter down to see only online activity from ‘Democratic Party’ politicians. It has another attribute, ‘State’, which allows you to filter down to look at online activity from just the politicians running for office in Michigan, 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 contact us 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 issues matching pre-defined search criteria become available to you in the system. For more details on this feature, see Creating Saved Search Alerts.
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 AND operation (When using the API, the code "%2B" may be substituted)
| 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"
A platform specific source of social media posts 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 platforms, 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 platforms, engagement is
In the context of social media platforms a feed is a series of posts that have been algorithmically placed in a queue for the user's consumption.
Social media users can influence the content appearing in their feeds by subscribing to channels 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 engagement metric.
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.
A means of referring to a specific piece of online content such as a web page or social media post.
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.
A network is a group of organizations that share a focus. When organizations are added, Junkipedia staff members assign them to the appropriate networks. Network examples include:
Misinformation News Monitoring
Election Protection
Junkipedia relates users from the same organization or team by linking their individual user accounts to an organization account.
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 content) online.
A unit of content shared via a social media platform.
Junkipedia users can be assigned roles that determine privileges they have within the system. See Inviting New Users for specific role options.
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
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 issues 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 within the app or by anyone from outside the app using tiplines.
See Tip-Issue-Narrative Pipeline for an explanation of the relationship between tips, issues, and narratives.
Tiplines make it easy for anyone to report problematic content. People can submit tips to Junkipedia through a tipline without having to set up an account and logging into the system. Here is an example of a tipline as a web form. Organizations using Junkipedia can create tiplines to be shared with their constituents via web forms, SMS, and other media.
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.
