Introduction

Why We Built Junkipedia

Prior to Junkipedia, we've witnessed journalists, researchers, and civic minded organizations duplicating efforts at tracking misinformation in social media. It became quickly obvious that pooling our resources would allow us to create better tools, collect more data, and benefit from collaborative work toward common civic goals. In the last two years, Junkipedia has rapidly grown to become the tool of choice for organizations who previously invested in their own in-house tools. Organizations who never had the means to create their own tools have also been able to adopt Junkipedia and are contributing talent and information to building the shared database that benefits all members.

How does it work?

Junkipedia enables organizations to monitor for, report, analyze, and respond to problematic content on social media in an easy-to-use, structured system that supports a range of methods to get data into and out of the platform. Users can build monitoring feeds based on their specific target area based on sources and terms relevant to the type of problematic content they want to understand. Users can report content they find within the Junkipedia monitoring platform, or found anywhere online using a variety of tiplines to submit content via the web, email, SMS, Slack, and WhatsApp. Organizations using the platform can share their content with any or all of the other organizations using Junkipedia to reduce duplication of effort, spot trends across communities, and enable real-time situational awareness about the evolution and spread of misinformation narratives.

Collaboration across institutions

Junkipedia already has over 100 organizations using the platform to share or investigate narratives and instances of misinformation. We work with several existing coalitions focused on this problem to ensure that information flows across platforms and gets where it needs to go. We work with academic researchers, civil society groups, and many newsrooms to help them directly monitor for mis- and disinformation, and we provide them with the ability to see the incidents and narratives submitted by all the other partners to ensure they have context and insight to inform their reporting.