mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Specious Sites: Tracking the Spread and Sway of Spurious News Stories at Scale

arXiv 2308.02068 ↗First posted 3 Aug 2023cs.SI cs.CY cs.LGcited by 7

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Abstract (arXiv)

Misinformation, propaganda, and outright lies proliferate on the web, with some narratives having dangerous real-world consequences on public health, elections, and individual safety. However, despite the impact of misinformation, the research community largely lacks automated and programmatic approaches for tracking news narratives across online platforms. In this work, utilizing daily scrapes of 1,334 unreliable news websites, the large-language model MPNet, and DP-Means clustering, we introduce a system to automatically identify and track the narratives spread within online ecosystems. Identifying 52,036 narratives on these 1,334 websites, we describe the most prevalent narratives spread in 2022 and identify the most influential websites that originate and amplify narratives. Finally, we show how our system can be utilized to detect new narratives originating from unreliable news websites and to aid fact-checkers in more quickly addressing misinformation. We release code and data at https://github.com/hanshanley/specious-sites.

Key facts. Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 36 of its 125 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 3 Aug 2023.

Builds on

36 of 125 references.

References · 36

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24 more
  1. 2020Top2Vec: Distributed Representations of Topicscited by 126
  2. 2017Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and Topic modeling: models, applications, a surveycited by 91
  3. 2021The Web Is Your Oyster - Knowledge-Intensive NLP against a Very Large Web Corpuscited by 60
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  17. 2021No Calm in The Storm: Investigating QAnon Website Relationshipscited by 5
  18. 2023Partial Mobilization: Tracking Multilingual Information Flows Amongst Russian Media Outlets and Telegramcited by 5
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Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2024: 1; 2025: 3; 2026: 3.

7 papers.

  1. 2025Hierarchical Level-Wise News Article Clustering via Multilingual Matryoshka Embeddingscited by 2
  2. 2025Tracking the Takes and Trajectories of English-Language News Narratives across Trustworthy and Worrisome Websitescited by 1
  3. 2025Identifying Emerging Concepts in Large Corporacited by 1
  4. 2024Modeling Information Narrative Detection and Evolution on Telegram during the Russia-Ukraine Warcited by 0
  5. 2026Cross-National Information Attacks: A Two-Decade Analysis of Troll Behavior in Koreacited by 0
  6. 2026From Repetition to Recognition: Inductive Discovery of Disinformation Narrativescited by 0
  7. 2026Unifying Models of Intergroup Hostility in Online Discoursecited by 0