Currently, my project has been approved, and I'm beginning to set up the framework to conduct my research. My methodology consists of selecting ten websites from each political lean (Left, Moderate, Right) through random selection and recording my interaction with each website to tally the number of dark patterns in each. For the purposes of my project, I specifically excluded non-news and non-functioning websites from the selection since the website both needs to be relevant and functioning to be examined.

       So far, I have established the websites I will be examining, which can be seen in the table on the left. The data was selected from an existing study (Bakshy, et al., 2015) which I analyzed using Python code (see below) that I wrote to analyze and sort the websites into separate categories and randomly select ten different websites from each category. I have also finalized a chart of definitions and pictures for each of the dark pattern types that I am examining to make it easier to sort each dark pattern accurately. As the chart is a comprehensive, multi-page chart for each pattern, the finalized chart can be found in the hyperlink below.

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LINK TO DARK PATTERN REFERENCE CHART