Welcome to PIEGraph!
This tool was developed to study and promote fact-based information consumption practices. It tracks news, political, and media sources that appear in your Twitter feed (your “Personal Information Environment”) and provides a visual representation (a “Graph”) of their political leaning and factual content scores based on ratings from Media Bias/Fact Check.
We created PIEGraph because we are interested in examining if, and to what extent, people are exposed to diverse political information of low and high quality on Twitter. We hope using this tool will help users better understand the information quality in their social media feeds and encourage them to seek out a high quality information environment. We are also interested in whether providing visual representations of the information credibility and political diversity in their feeds (the PIEGraph) will help users find more fact-based content on Twitter.
PIEGraph is the first tool developed by the Political and Civic App Division (PCAD) of the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The PCAD team is led by CITAP Principal Researcher and UNC associate professor Deen Freelon. PCAD developer Andrew Crist helped Freelon bring his vision for PIEGraph to life. Postdoctoral Research Associate Meredith L. Pruden and Research Assistants Daniel Malmer and Remmah Legaard round out the team.
PIEGraph is for everyone, and we invite you to visualize your personalized information environment on Twitter. The PCAD team is also conducting a study in conjunction with the launch of this tool. If you were recruited by our research partner Dynata, please be sure you access PIEGraph using the unique ID provided by Dynata. Regardless of how you found us, the longer you use PIEGraph, the more data will appear in your chart. Check back regularly to see new media sources and their ratings appear on your graph and, if you’d like, adjust your information environment on Twitter accordingly. View “What can I do with the data contained in my personal information environment?” in our FAQ for ideas on how to improve it.