MurkySky: Analyzing News Reliability on Bluesky

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Reddy, Vikas, Ciampaglia, Giovanni Luca
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Reddy, Vikas
Ciampaglia, Giovanni Luca
author_facet Reddy, Vikas
Ciampaglia, Giovanni Luca
contents Bluesky has recently emerged as a lively competitor to Twitter/X for a platform for public discourse and news sharing. Most of the research on Bluesky so far has focused on characterizing its adoption due to migration. There has been less interest on characterizing the properties of Bluesky as a platform for news sharing and discussion, and in particular the prevalence of unreliable information on it. To fill this gap, this research provides the first comprehensive analysis of news reliability on Bluesky. We introduce MurkySky, a public tool to track the prevalence of content from unreliable news sources on Bluesky. Using firehose data from the summer of 2024, we find that on Bluesky reliable-source news content is prevalent, and largely originating from left-leaning sources. Content from unreliable news sources, while accounting for a small fraction of all news-linking posts, tends to originate from more partisan sources, but largely reflects the left-leaning skew of the platform. Analysis of the language and hashtags used in news-linking posts shows that unreliable-source content concentrates on specific topics of discussion.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_10557
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MurkySky: Analyzing News Reliability on Bluesky
Reddy, Vikas
Ciampaglia, Giovanni Luca
Social and Information Networks
Bluesky has recently emerged as a lively competitor to Twitter/X for a platform for public discourse and news sharing. Most of the research on Bluesky so far has focused on characterizing its adoption due to migration. There has been less interest on characterizing the properties of Bluesky as a platform for news sharing and discussion, and in particular the prevalence of unreliable information on it. To fill this gap, this research provides the first comprehensive analysis of news reliability on Bluesky. We introduce MurkySky, a public tool to track the prevalence of content from unreliable news sources on Bluesky. Using firehose data from the summer of 2024, we find that on Bluesky reliable-source news content is prevalent, and largely originating from left-leaning sources. Content from unreliable news sources, while accounting for a small fraction of all news-linking posts, tends to originate from more partisan sources, but largely reflects the left-leaning skew of the platform. Analysis of the language and hashtags used in news-linking posts shows that unreliable-source content concentrates on specific topics of discussion.
title MurkySky: Analyzing News Reliability on Bluesky
topic Social and Information Networks
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.10557