Reporting Plagiarism / The Chain of Misinformation
Digital journalism and the surrounding economy has favored the quick reproduction of existing content with minor modifications to attract as many visitors / readers as possible, thus convincing that the illusion of popularity is a fact. Furthermore, readers have difficulty in accessing the original content or at least recognizing the source of it. But most importantly, citizens are lost in a labyrinth created by recommendation algorithms imposed by search engines, social media and biased content.
Plagiarism and self-plagiarism is a very common practice among news organisations, blogs, tabloids or even news agencies these days and although is not a crime, it’s a breach of journalism ethics.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, misinformation is defined as “false or inaccurate information, especially that which is deliberately intended to deceive” [https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/misinformation]. In other terms, misinformation is a method of manipulating public opinion.
How plagiarism and misinformation related?
In most cases a “misinformative” news story is a part of a pre-existing one. In such cases we observe that parts or entire articles paraphrased and misinterpreted or misrepresented advisedly either from a single source or from multiple sources to produce a new story to achieve their goals. The steps between the original story and the new is “The Chain of Misinformation”.
plagiari.sm is a collection of services (a platform) that helps journalists / fact-checkers and citizens get a better understanding on how information is fabricated and disseminated, by monitoring, discovering, analyzing and reporting the chain of misinformation in real-time, among on-line news organisations. Ultimately, it is a modern, intuitive and easy to use platform that evaluates on-line content and on-line content distributors.
By detecting plagiarism and the chain of misinformation, we can accomplish many things.
- We can find the unauthorized use of content and protect authors and their thoughts, ideas or expressions.
- We can report plagiarism just in time, thus original content creators can re-claim the revenues they deserve or even take legal actions against those who misuse the intellectual property rights.
- We can rank local networks according to the primary content creation overall score and measure the quality.
- We can locate self-plagiarism, paraphrase or patchwork plagiarism and investigate the evolution of an article.
- We can find falsification, which is the matrix of misinformation and thus, biased content.
- We can visualize the network of the plagiarised content and help not only journalists / fact-checkers but also citizens understand how a story is being transformed.
Manual plagiarism detection is tedious and extremely time consuming especially when it is partially modified, moreover, in real-time. plagiari.sm provides the necessary tools to reveal and confine this practice, of news modification or fabrication and the unauthorized use of content.
The long term social — economic — political crisis affected journalism, among others, but above all Democracy. As long as trust in News Media continues to drop, we need more ways for journalists / fact-checkers and citizens to be able to identify the source of misinformation.
As a team, we want to empower journalists and citizens, provide them assistance to identify tendentiousness and prevent them from being part of spreading misinformation unintentionally, while making that last action easier to public criticism.
If you are interested in learning more about our project, want an early access to our platform or you like to participate on our private polls you can sign-up to our newsletter. For further inquiries please use press@plagiari.sm.
