Active Measures

The Fringes of Disinfo: A Network Based on Referrers

Published: 2016 February 07

In webspeak, a referrer is a site that refers its readers to another site via hyperlinks. The posting of those links may be a conscious act on the part of a site's operators, or it may be the work of a contributing reader, and as such may not constitute an endorsement. That said, the study of referrers can reveal the pathways along which information of all sorts moves. In the present instance, I made use of the free referrer data provided by similarweb.com. For any given site SimilarWeb reveals what they believe to be the top five referrers to the site, as well as the top five sites the target refers their own readers to. In the graph below, the arrows indicate the direction of the referral. The snowball method was used to identify new sites to add to the data until I hit the point of diminishing returns. Regarding disinformation, keep in mind that this is a general characterization, and refers to info that is not necessarily fake, but more likely insanely skewed in some direction not necessarily supported by what facts may exist.

By way of example, people who posted links at zerohedge to the 'target' sites, and vice versa.

Source of referral	Target of referral
drudgereport.com	zerohedge.com
rense.com	zerohedge.com
stevequayle.com	zerohedge.com
zerohedge.com	beforeitsnews.com
zerohedge.com	brotherjohnf.com
zerohedge.com	counterpunch.org
zerohedge.com	endoftheamericandream.com
zerohedge.com	globalresearch.ca
zerohedge.com	goldsilver.com
zerohedge.com	informationclearinghouse.info
zerohedge.com	journal-neo.org
zerohedge.com	nakedcapitalism.com
zerohedge.com	paulcraigroberts.org
zerohedge.com	thesaker.is
zerohedge.com	veteranstoday.com
zerohedge.com	voltairenet.org
zerohedge.com	washingtonsblog.com

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