BuzzFeed-Webis Fake News Corpus 2016

The corpus comprises the output of 9 publishers in a week close to the US elections. Among the selected publishers are 6 prolific hyperpartisan ones (three left-wing and three right-wing), and three mainstream publishers (see Table 1). All publishers earned Facebook’s blue checkmark, indicating authenticity and an elevated status within the network. For seven weekdays (September 19 to 23 and September 26 and 27), every post and linked news article of the 9 publishers was fact-checked by professional journalists at BuzzFeed. In total, 1,627 articles were checked, 826 mainstream, 256 left-wing and 545 right-wing. The imbalance between categories results from differing publication frequencies.