  In recent years, the phenomenon of online misinformation and junk news
circulating on social media has come to constitute an important and widespread
problem affecting public life online across the globe, particularly around
important political events such as elections. At the same time, there have been
calls for more transparency around misinformation on social media platforms, as
many of the most popular social media platforms function as "walled gardens,"
where it is impossible for researchers and the public to readily examine the
scale and nature of misinformation activity as it unfolds on the platforms. In
order to help address this, we present the Junk News Aggregator, a publicly
available interactive web tool, which allows anyone to examine, in near
real-time, all of the public content posted to Facebook by important junk news
sources in the US. It allows the public to gain access to and examine the
latest articles posted on Facebook (the most popular social media platform in
the US and one where content is not readily accessible at scale from the open
Web), as well as organise them by time, news publisher, and keywords of
interest, and sort them based on all eight engagement metrics available on
Facebook. Therefore, the Aggregator allows the public to gain insights on the
volume, content, key themes, and types and volumes of engagement received by
content posted by junk news publishers, in near real-time, hence opening up and
offering transparency in these activities as they unfold, at scale across the
top most popular junk news publishers. In this way, the Aggregator can help
increase transparency around the nature, volume, and engagement with junk news
on social media, and serve as a media literacy tool for the public.
