Periscope
20 NEWSWEEK.COM MARCH 12, 2021
A Diet of Hoaxes
An analysis by NewsGuard and PeakMetrics
fo un d t h at 87 p e r c e nt of t h e n e w s link s s h ar e d o n P ar l e r
in the time period surrounding the Capitol
Hill r i ot r e a c h c am e f r o m mi s info r m at i o n s o ur c e snews links shared on the
social media app Parler around
the time of the January 6th Capitol
insurrection came overwhelmingly
from misinformation websites,
including dozens of sites flagged by
NewsGuard for publishing election
and voting falsehoods.
Parler recently relaunched after
being removed from Apple and
Google’s mobile app stores and Ama-
zon’s web hosting service for its role
in the breach of the U.S. Capitol by
armed protestors.
NewsGuard and
PeakMetrics’ analysis,
which covered more
than 17,000 public
Parler posts from the
first week of January
2021 that included links,
showed 87 percent of the news links
shared during that time period came
from websites with red “unreliable”
ratings from NewsGuard, meaning
that they fail to adhere to basic jour-
nalistic standards.
PeakMetrics, which uses machine
learning to draw insights from mil-
lions of media sources, collected the
data and extracted links and domain
data from the posts. NewsGuard,
which deploys trained journalists to
track online misinformation sources
and narratives, analyzed the data
against its database of credibility rat-
ings for thousands of news sources.
The analysis focused on news and
information website links specifi-
cally; it excluded links to ecommerce
websites, links to posts on other plat-
forms like Facebook or Twitter and
links directed through URL shorten-
ers like Bit.ly.
NewsGuard and PeakMetrics
found the most-linked news source
on the platform during the time
period covered in our dataset was
a North Macedonian website called
“American Conservatives Today,”
which was linked to 2,917 times.
NewsGuard’s review
found that WHOIS
domain registration
records show, despite
its name, AmericanCon-
servatives.today is run
from Kumanovo, a city in
North Macedonia. NewsGuard found
that the site, which was launched in
December 2020, repeatedly publishes
false political news stories plagiarized
from The Gateway Pundit, including
the claim that the voting machine
company Dominion Voting Systems
rigged its machines to switch votes
from then-President Trump to Joe
Biden. The site earns a credibility score
of 0 out of 100 from NewsGuard, fail-
ing all of its nine journalistic criteria.
Other top domains in the list
included TheResistance.video, a
domain associated with banned.video,
a video website owned by InfoWars.BYMATT SKIBINSKI
@mskibinskiONLINE