In the contemporary era of information explosion, we are often faced with the mixture of massive \emph{truth} (true information) and \emph{rumor} (false information) flooded over social networks. Under such circumstances, it is very essential to infer whether each claim (e.g., news, messages) is a truth or a rumor, and identify their \emph{sources}, i.e., the users who initially spread those claims. While most prior arts have been dedicated to the two tasks respectively, this paper aims to offer the joint inference on truth/rumor and their sources. Our insight is that a joint inference can enhance the mutual performance on both sides.
To this end, we propose a framework named SourceCR, which alternates between two modules, i.e., \emph{credibility-reliability training} for truth/rumor inference and \emph{division-querying} for source detection, in an iterative manner. To elaborate, the former module performs a simultaneous estimation of claim credibility and user reliability by virtue of an Expectation Maximization algorithm, which takes the source reliability outputted from the latter module as the initial input. Meanwhile, the latter module divides the network into two different subnetworks labeled via the claim credibility, and in each subnetwork launches source detection by applying querying of theoretical budget guarantee to the users selected via the estimated reliability from the former module. The proposed SourceCR is provably convergent, and algorithmic implementable with reasonable computational complexity. We empirically validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework in both synthetic and real datasets, where the joint inference leads to an up to 35\% accuracy of credibility gain and 29\% source detection rate gain compared with the separate counterparts.
Spreading truths is recognized as a feasible strategy for inhibiting rumors. This paper is devoted to assessing the effectiveness of the truth-spreading strategy. An individual-level rumor-truth spreading model (the generic URTU model) is derived. Under the model, two criteria for the termination of a rumor are presented. These criteria capture the influence of the network structures on the effectiveness of the truth-spreading strategy. Extensive simulations show that, when the rumor or the truth terminates, the dynamics of a simplified URTU model (the linear URTU model) fits well with the act…
Spreading truths and blocking rumors are two typical strategies for inhibiting rumors. In practice, a tradeoff between the two strategies, which is known as the TSRB strategy, may achieve a better cost-effectiveness. This paper is devoted to assessing the effectiveness of the TSRB strategy. For that purpose, an individual-level spreading model (the generic URQT model) capturing the interaction between a rumor and the truth is established. Under the model, a set of criteria for the dying out of a rumor is presented. These criteria capture the combined influence of the basic parameters and the n…
This paper addresses the issue of suppressing a rumor using the truth in a cost-effective way. First, an individual-level dynamical model capturing the rumor-truth mixed spreading processes is proposed. On this basis, the cost-effective rumor-containing problem is modeled as an optimization problem. Extensive experiments show that finding a cost-effective rumor-containing strategy boils down to enhancing the first truth-spreading rate until the cost effectiveness of the rumor-containing strategy reaches the first turning point. This finding greatly reduces the time spent for solving the optimi…
Social media platforms disseminate extensive volumes of online content, including true and, in particular, false rumors. Previous literature has studied the diffusion of offline rumors, yet more research is needed to understand the diffusion of online rumors. In this paper, we examine the role of lifetime and crowd effects in social media sharing behavior for true vs. false rumors. Based on 126,301 Twitter cascades, we find that the sharing behavior is characterized by lifetime and crowd effects that explain differences in the spread of true as opposed to false rumors. All else equal, we find …
Existing rumor detection strategies typically provide detection labels while ignoring their explanation. Nonetheless, providing pieces of evidence to explain why a suspicious tweet is rumor is essential. As such, a novel model, LOSIRD, was proposed in this paper. First, LOSIRD mines appropriate evidence sentences and classifies them by automatically checking the veracity of the relationship of the given claim and its evidence from about 5 million Wikipedia documents. LOSIRD then automatically constructs two heterogeneous graph objects to simulate the propagation layout of the tweets and code t…
The propagation of a rumor (unverified information) on a social network is subject to several factors mainly related to the content of this information and especially to the behaviors (profiles) of the actors on this network that retransmit. This state of affairs may vary this propagation as the case may be, and this is what we call the depth of the rumor. This project is tackling this problem. From a real case of the spread of a rumor on Twitter, this contribution proposes an academic approach to quantify the depth of a rumor on social networks and this, for use and interpretation, by special…
With the development of network technology, many social media are flourishing. Due to imperfect Internet regulation, the spread of false rumors has become a common problem on those social platforms. Social platforms can generate rumor data in their operation process, but existing rumor detection models are all constructed for a single social platform, which ignores the value of cross-platform rumor. This paper combines the federated learning paradigm with the bidirectional graph attention network rumor detection model and proposes the federated graph attention network(FedGAT) model for rumor d…
Rumors spread dramatically fast through online social media services, and people are exploring methods to detect rumors automatically. Existing methods typically learn semantic representations of all reposts to a rumor candidate for prediction. However, it is crucial to efficiently detect rumors as early as possible before they cause severe social disruption, which has not been well addressed by previous works. In this paper, we present a novel early rumor detection model, Credible Early Detection (CED). By regarding all reposts to a rumor candidate as a sequence, the proposed model will seek …
Social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, has become one of the most important channels for information dissemination. However, these social media platforms are often misused to spread rumors, which has brought about severe social problems, and consequently, there are urgent needs for automatic rumor detection techniques. Existing work on rumor detection concentrates more on the utilization of textual features, but diffusion structure itself can provide critical propagating information in identifying rumors. Previous works which have considered structural information, only utilize limited pr…
Rumor source identification in large social networks has received significant attention lately. Most recent works deal with the scale of the problem by observing a subset of the nodes in the network, called sensors, to estimate the source. This paper addresses the problem of locating the source of a rumor in large social networks where some of these sensor nodes have failed. We estimate the missing information about the sensors using doubly non-negative (DN) matrix completion and compressed sensing techniques. This is then used to identify the actual source by using a maximum likelihood estima…
Social networks allow rapid spread of ideas and innovations while the negative information can also propagate widely. When the cascades with different opinions reaching the same user, the cascade arriving first is the most likely to be taken by the user. Therefore, once misinformation or rumor is detected, a natural containment method is to introduce a positive cascade competing against the rumor. Given a budget $k$, the rumor blocking problem asks for $k$ seed users to trigger the spread of the positive cascade such that the number of the users who are not influenced by rumor can be maximized…
In the era of the rapid development of the Internet, the threshold for information spreading has become lower. Most of the time, rumors, as a special kind of information, are harmful to society. And once the rumor appears, the truth will follow. Considering that the rumor and truth compete with each other like light and darkness in reality, in this paper, we study a rumor spreading model in the homogeneous network called 2SIH2R, in which there are both spreader1(people who spread the rumor) and spreader2(people who spread the truth). In this model, we introduced discernible mechanism and confr…
Social network is a main tunnel of rumor spreading. Previous studies are concentrated on a static rumor spreading. The content of the rumor is invariable during the whole spreading process. Indeed, the rumor evolves constantly in its spreading process, which grows shorter, more concise, more easily grasped and told. In an early psychological experiment, researchers found about 70% of details in a rumor were lost in the first 6 mouth-to-mouth transmissions \cite{TPR}. Based on the facts, we investigate rumor spreading on social networks, where the content of the rumor is modified by the individ…
Online social networks provide a convenient platform for the spread of rumors, which could lead to serious aftermaths such as economic losses and public panic. The classical rumor blocking problem aims to launch a set of nodes as a positive cascade to compete with misinformation in order to limit the spread of rumors. However, most of the related researches were based on one-dimensional diffusion model. In reality, there are more than one feature associated with an object. The user's impression on this object is determined not just by one feature but by his/her overall evaluation on all of the…
The ever-increasing amount of multimedia content on modern social media platforms are valuable in many applications. While the openness and convenience features of social media also foster many rumors online. Without verification, these rumors would reach thousands of users immediately and cause serious damages. Many efforts have been taken to defeat online rumors automatically by mining the rich content provided on the open network with machine learning techniques. Most rumor detection methods can be categorized in three paradigms: the hand-crafted features based classification approaches, th…
This research examines the propagation of rumors on social networks during public health emergencies and explores strategies to effectively manage false information in cyberspace. Using a simulation model, the study analyzes the impact of factors such as communication channel control, government intervention, and individual personalities on the spread of rumors. The results suggest that enhancing netizens' knowledge and capacity to recognize and resist rumors, developing rumor-debunking platforms, and promoting a "clear" ecology of network information content are effective strategies for contr…
Health-related rumors spreading online during a public crisis may pose a serious threat to people's well-being. Existing crisis informatics research lacks in-depth insights into the characteristics of health rumors and the efforts to debunk them on social media in a pandemic. To fill this gap, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of four months of rumor-related online discussion during COVID-19 on Weibo, a Chinese microblogging site. Results suggest that the dread (cause fear) type of health rumors provoked significantly more discussions and lasted longer than the wish (raise hope) type. We fur…
The spread of rumors through social media and online social networks can not only disrupt the daily lives of citizens but also result in loss of life and property. A rumor spreads when individuals, who are unable decide the authenticity of the information, mistake the rumor as genuine information and pass it on to their acquaintances. We propose a solution where a set of individuals (based on their degree) in the social network are trained and provided resources to help them distinguish a rumor from genuine information. By formulating an optimization problem we calculate the optimum set of ind…
With the growing popularity and ease of access to the internet, the problem of online rumors is escalating. People are relying on social media to gain information readily but fall prey to false information. There is a lack of credibility assessment techniques for online posts to identify rumors as soon as they arrive. Existing studies have formulated several mechanisms to combat online rumors by developing machine learning and deep learning algorithms. The literature so far provides supervised frameworks for rumor classification that rely on huge training datasets. However, in the online scena…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）
Social media has been developing rapidly in public due to its nature of spreading new information, which leads to rumors being circulated. Meanwhile, detecting rumors from such massive information in social media is becoming an arduous challenge. Therefore, some deep learning methods are applied to discover rumors through the way they spread, such as Recursive Neural Network (RvNN) and so on. However, these deep learning methods only take into account the patterns of deep propagation but ignore the structures of wide dispersion in rumor detection. Actually, propagation and dispersion are two c…
In this paper, we study how rumors in Online Social Networks (OSNs) may impact the performance of device-to-device (D2D) communication. As D2D is a new technology, people may choose not to use it when believed in rumors of its negative impacts. Thus, the cellular network with underlaying D2D is vulnerable to OSNs as rumors in OSNs may decrement the throughput of the cellular network in popular content delivery scenarios. To analyze the vulnerability, we introduce the problem of finding the most critical nodes in the OSN such that the throughput of a content delivery scenario is minimized when …
Social networks are the major routes for most individuals to exchange their opinions about new products, social trends and political issues via their interactions. It is often of significant importance to figure out who initially diffuses the information, ie, finding a rumor source or a trend setter. It is known that such a task is highly challenging and the source detection probability cannot be beyond 31 percent for regular trees, if we just estimate the source from a given diffusion snapshot. In practice, finding the source often entails the process of querying that asks "Are you the rumor …
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Beijing Electronic Science and Technology Institute（北京电子科技学院）
Rumor detection has become an emerging and active research field in recent years. At the core is to model the rumor characteristics inherent in rich information, such as propagation patterns in social network and semantic patterns in post content, and differentiate them from the truth. However, existing works on rumor detection fall short in modeling heterogeneous information, either using one single information source only (e.g. social network, or post content) or ignoring the relations among multiple sources (e.g. fusing social and content features via simple concatenation). Therefore, they …
Large-scale rumor spreading could pose severe social and economic damages. The emergence of online social networks along with the new media can even make rumor spreading more severe. Effective control of rumor spreading is of theoretical and practical significance. This paper takes the first step to understand how the blockchain technology can help limit the spread of rumors. Specifically, we develop a new paradigm for social networks embedded with the blockchain technology, which employs decentralized contracts to motivate trust networks as well as secure information exchange contract. We des…
With the development of social media, social communication has changed. While this facilitates people's communication and access to information, it also provides an ideal platform for spreading rumors. In normal or critical situations, rumors will affect people's judgment and even endanger social security. However, natural language is high-dimensional and sparse, and the same rumor may be expressed in hundreds of ways on social media. As such, the robustness and generalization of the current rumor detection model are put into question. We proposed a novel \textbf{h}ierarchical \textbf{a}dversa…
False rumors are known to have detrimental effects on society. To prevent the spread of false rumors, social media platforms such as Twitter must detect them early. In this work, we develop a novel probabilistic mixture model that classifies true vs. false rumors based on the underlying spreading process. Specifically, our model is the first to formalize the self-exciting nature of true vs. false retweeting processes. This results in a novel mixture marked Hawkes model (MMHM). Owing to this, our model obviates the need for feature engineering; instead, it directly models the spreading process …
We introduce the generalized rumor spreading model and investigate some properties of this model on different complex social networks. Despite pervious rumor models that both the spreader-spreader ($SS$) and the spreader-stifler ($SR$) interactions have the same rate $α$, we define $α^{(1)}$ and $α^{(2)}$ for $SS$ and $SR$ interactions, respectively. The effect of variation of $α^{(1)}$ and $α^{(2)}$ on the final density of stiflers is investigated. Furthermore, the influence of the topological structure of the network in rumor spreading is studied by analyzing the behavior of several global p…
Social media platforms have been used for information and news gathering, and they are very valuable in many applications. However, they also lead to the spreading of rumors and fake news. Many efforts have been taken to detect and debunk rumors on social media by analyzing their content and social context using machine learning techniques. This paper gives an overview of the recent studies in the rumor detection field. It provides a comprehensive list of datasets used for rumor detection, and reviews the important studies based on what types of information they exploit and the approaches they…
The spread of rumors, which are known as unverified statements of uncertain origin, may cause tremendous number of social problems. If it would be possible to identify factors affecting spreading a rumor (such as agents' desires, trust network, etc.), then this could be used to slowdown or stop its spreading. A computational model that includes rumor features and the way a rumor is spread among society's members, based on their desires, is therefore needed. Our research is centering on the relation between the homogeneity of the society and rumor convergence in it and result shows that the hom…
Harvard University（哈佛大学）；Kensho Technologies（肯肖科技）；Harvard Data Science Initiative（哈佛数据科学倡议）
Recent work in the domain of misinformation detection has leveraged rich signals in the text and user identities associated with content on social media. But text can be strategically manipulated and accounts reopened under different aliases, suggesting that these approaches are inherently brittle. In this work, we investigate an alternative modality that is naturally robust: the pattern in which information propagates. Can the veracity of an unverified rumor spreading online be discerned solely on the basis of its pattern of diffusion through the social network? Using graph kernels to extract…
Social media have become part of modern news reporting, used by journalists to spread information and find sources, or as a news source by individuals. The quest for prominence and recognition on social media sites like Twitter can sometimes eclipse accuracy and lead to the spread of false information. As a way to study and react to this trend, we introduce {\sc TwitterTrails}, an interactive, web-based tool ({\tt twittertrails.com}) that allows users to investigate the origin and propagation characteristics of a rumor and its refutation, if any, on Twitter. Visualizations of burst activity, p…
While false rumors pose a threat to the successful overcoming of the COVID-19 pandemic, an understanding of how rumors diffuse in online social networks is - even for non-crisis situations - still in its infancy. Here we analyze a large sample consisting of COVID-19 rumor cascades from Twitter that have been fact-checked by third-party organizations. The data comprises N=10,610 rumor cascades that have been retweeted more than 24 million times. We investigate whether COVID-19 misinformation spreads more viral than the truth and whether the differences in the diffusion of true vs. false rumors …
Misinformation and rumor can spread rapidly and widely through online social networks and therefore rumor controlling has become a critical issue. It is often assumed that there is a single authority whose goal is to minimize the spread of rumor by generating a positive cascade. In this paper, we study a more realistic scenario when there are multiple positive cascades generated by different agents. For the multiple-cascade diffusion, we propose the P2P independent cascade (PIC) model for private social communications. The main part of this paper is an analysis of the rumor blocking effect (i.…
The paper addresses a method for spreading messages in social networks through an initial acceleration by Spreading Groups. These groups start the spread which eventually reaches a larger portion of the network. The use of spreading groups creates a final flow which resembles the spread through the nodes with the highest level of influence (opinion leaders). While harnessing opinion leaders to spread messages is generally costly, the formation of spreading groups is merely a technical issue, and can be done by computerized bots. The paper presents an information flow model and inspects the mod…
University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Google（谷歌）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
The widespread adoption of online social networks in daily life has created a pressing need for effectively classifying user-generated content. This work presents techniques for classifying linked content spread on forum websites -- specifically, links to news articles or blogs -- using user interaction signals alone. Importantly, online forums such as Reddit do not have a user-generated social graph, which is assumed in social network behavioral-based classification settings. Using Reddit as a case-study, we show how to obtain a derived social graph, and use this graph, Reddit post sequences,…
Early rumor detection (ERD) on social media platform is very challenging when limited, incomplete and noisy information is available. Most of the existing methods have largely worked on event-level detection that requires the collection of posts relevant to a specific event and relied only on user-generated content. They are not appropriate to detect rumor sources in the very early stages, before an event unfolds and becomes widespread. In this paper, we address the task of ERD at the message level. We present a novel hybrid neural network architecture, which combines a task-specific character…
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学网络空间安全学院）；Macquarie University（麦考瑞大学）；Xiaomi AI Lab（小米人工智能实验室）
With the rapid development of mobile Internet technology and the widespread use of mobile devices, it becomes much easier for people to express their opinions on social media. The openness and convenience of social media platforms provide a free expression for people but also cause new social problems. The widespread of false rumors on social media can bring about the panic of the public and damage personal reputation, which makes rumor automatic detection technology become particularly necessary. The majority of existing methods for rumor detection focus on mining effective features from text…
Due to the extensive role of social networks in social media, it is easy for people to share the news, and it spreads faster than ever before. These platforms also have been exploited to share the rumor or fake information, which is a threat to society. One method to reduce the impact of fake information is making people aware of the correct information based on hard proof. In this work, first, we propose a propagation model called Competitive Independent Cascade Model with users' Bias (CICMB) that considers the presence of strong user bias towards different opinions, believes, or political pa…
The University of Queensland（昆士兰大学）；Deakin University（迪肯大学）；The University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）
The proliferation of social media in communication and information dissemination has made it an ideal platform for spreading rumors. Automatically debunking rumors at their stage of diffusion is known as \textit{early rumor detection}, which refers to dealing with sequential posts regarding disputed factual claims with certain variations and highly textual duplication over time. Thus, identifying trending rumors demands an efficient yet flexible model that is able to capture long-range dependencies among postings and produce distinct representations for the accurate early detection. However, i…
With social media becoming ubiquitous, information consumption from this media has also increased. However, one of the serious problems that have emerged with this increase, is the propagation of rumors. Therefore, rumor identification is a very critical task with significant implications to economy, democracy as well as public health and safety. We tackle the problem of automated detection of rumors in social media in this paper by designing a modular explainable architecture that uses both latent and handcrafted features and can be expanded to as many new classes of features as desired. This…
The spread of ideas in online social networks is a crucial phenomenon to understand nowadays the proliferation of fake news and their impact in democracies. This makes necessary to use models that mimic the circulation of rumors. The law of large numbers as well as the probability distribution of contact groups allow us to construct a model with a minimum number of hypotheses. Moreover, we can analyze with this model the presence of very polarized groups of individuals (humans or bots) who spread a rumor as soon as they know about it. Given only the initial number of individuals who know any n…
The burst in the use of online social networks over the last decade has provided evidence that current rumor spreading models miss some fundamental ingredients in order to reproduce how information is disseminated. In particular, recent literature has revealed that these models fail to reproduce the fact that some nodes in a network have an influential role when it comes to spread a piece of information. In this work, we introduce two mechanisms with the aim of filling the gap between theoretical and experimental results. The first model introduces the assumption that spreaders are not always …
