Recent studies have confirmed a growing trend, especially among youngsters, of using Online Social Media as favourite information platform at the expense of traditional mass media. Indeed, they can easily reach a wide audience at a high speed; but exactly because of this they are the preferred medium for influencing public opinion via so-called fake news. Moreover, there is a general agreement that the main vehicle of fakes news are malicious software robots (bots) that automatically interact with human users. In previous work we have considered the problem of tagging human users in Online Social Networks as credulous users. Specifically, we have considered credulous those users with relatively high number of bot friends when compared to total number of their social friends. We consider this group of users worth of attention because they might have a higher exposure to malicious activities and they may contribute to the spreading of fake information by sharing dubious content. In this work, starting from a dataset of fake news, we investigate the behaviour and the degree of involvement of credulous users in fake news diffusion. The study aims to: (i) fight fake news by considering the content diffused by credulous users; (ii) highlight the relationship between credulous users and fake news spreading; (iii) target fake news detection by focusing on the analysis of specific accounts more exposed to malicious activities of bots. Our first results demonstrate a strong involvement of credulous users in fake news diffusion. This findings are calling for tools that, by performing data streaming on credulous' users actions, enables us to perform targeted fact-checking.
Online Social Media represent a pervasive source of information able to reach a huge audience. Sadly, recent studies show how online social bots (automated, often malicious accounts, populating social networks and mimicking genuine users) are able to amplify the dissemination of (fake) information by orders of magnitude. Using Twitter as a benchmark, in this work we focus on what we define credulous users, i.e., human-operated accounts with a high percentage of bots among their followings. Being more exposed to the harmful activities of social bots, credulous users may run the risk of being mo…
Social networks (SNs) are increasingly important sources of news for many people. The online connections made by users allows information to spread more easily than traditional news media (e.g., newspaper, television). However, they also make the spread of fake news easier than in traditional media, especially through the users' social network connections. In this paper, we focus on investigating if the SNs' users connection structure can aid fake news detection on Twitter. In particular, we propose to embed users based on their follower or friendship networks on the Twitter platform, so as to…
Information quality in social media is an increasingly important issue, but web-scale data hinders experts' ability to assess and correct much of the inaccurate content, or `fake news,' present in these platforms. This paper develops a method for automating fake news detection on Twitter by learning to predict accuracy assessments in two credibility-focused Twitter datasets: CREDBANK, a crowdsourced dataset of accuracy assessments for events in Twitter, and PHEME, a dataset of potential rumors in Twitter and journalistic assessments of their accuracies. We apply this method to Twitter content …
PRHLT Research Center, Universitat Politècnica de València（瓦伦西亚理工大学PRHLT研究中心）；University of Mannheim（曼海姆大学）
We present an approach to detect fake news in Twitter at the account level using a neural recurrent model and a variety of different semantic and stylistic features. Our method extracts a set of features from the timelines of news Twitter accounts by reading their posts as chunks, rather than dealing with each tweet independently. We show the experimental benefits of modeling latent stylistic signatures of mixed fake and real news with a sequential model over a wide range of strong baselines.
Ivan Franko National University of Lviv（利沃夫伊万·弗兰科国立大学）
In the paper, different approaches for the analysis of news trends on Twitter has been considered. For the analysis and case study, informational trends on Twitter caused by Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 year have been studied. A deep learning approach for fake news detection has been analyzed. The use of the theory of frequent itemsets and association rules, graph theory for news trends analytics have been considered.
Fake news can have a significant negative impact on society because of the growing use of mobile devices and the worldwide increase in Internet access. It is therefore essential to develop a simple mathematical model to understand the online dissemination of fake news. In this study, we propose a point process model of the spread of fake news on Twitter. The proposed model describes the spread of a fake news item as a two-stage process: initially, fake news spreads as a piece of ordinary news; then, when most users start recognizing the falsity of the news item, that itself spreads as another …
False information spreads on social media, and fact-checking is a potential countermeasure. However, there is a severe shortage of fact-checkers; an efficient way to scale fact-checking is desperately needed, especially in pandemics like COVID-19. In this study, we focus on spontaneous debunking by social media users, which has been missed in existing research despite its indicated usefulness for fact-checking and countering false information. Specifically, we characterize the tweets with false information, or fake tweets, that tend to be debunked and Twitter users who often debunk fake tweets…
C3Ri Research Institute（C3Ri研究所）；Sheffield Hallam University（谢菲尔德哈勒姆大学）
The problem associated with the propagation of fake news continues to grow at an alarming scale. This trend has generated much interest from politics to academia and industry alike. We propose a framework that detects and classifies fake news messages from Twitter posts using hybrid of convolutional neural networks and long-short term recurrent neural network models. The proposed work using this deep learning approach achieves 82% accuracy. Our approach intuitively identifies relevant features associated with fake news stories without previous knowledge of the domain.
The outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has been accompanied by a large amount of misleading and false information about the virus, especially on social media. During the pandemic social media gained special interest as it went on to become an important medium of communication. This made the information being relayed on these platforms especially critical. In our work, we aim to explore the percentage of fake news being spread on Twitter as well as measure the sentiment of the public at the same time. We further study how the sentiment of fear is present among the public. I…
The dynamics and influence of fake news on Twitter during the 2016 US presidential election remains to be clarified. Here, we use a dataset of 171 million tweets in the five months preceding the election day to identify 30 million tweets, from 2.2 million users, which contain a link to news outlets. Based on a classification of news outlets curated by www.opensources.co, we find that 25% of these tweets spread either fake or extremely biased news. We characterize the networks of information flow to find the most influential spreaders of fake and traditional news and use causal modeling to unco…
This article presents a preliminary approach towards characterizing political fake news on Twitter through the analysis of their meta-data. In particular, we focus on more than 1.5M tweets collected on the day of the election of Donald Trump as 45th president of the United States of America. We use the meta-data embedded within those tweets in order to look for differences between tweets containing fake news and tweets not containing them. Specifically, we perform our analysis only on tweets that went viral, by studying proxies for users' exposure to the tweets, by characterizing accounts spre…
We uncover a previously unknown, ongoing astroturfing attack on the popularity mechanisms of social media platforms: ephemeral astroturfing attacks. In this attack, a chosen keyword or topic is artificially promoted by coordinated and inauthentic activity to appear popular, and, crucially, this activity is removed as part of the attack. We observe such attacks on Twitter trends and find that these attacks are not only successful but also pervasive. We detected over 19,000 unique fake trends promoted by over 108,000 accounts, including not only fake but also compromised accounts, many of which …
University of California, Santa Cruz（加利福尼亚大学圣克鲁兹分校）；École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne（洛桑联邦理工学院）；DePaul University（德保罗大学）；Università Cattolica（天主教大学）
Social networks offer a ready channel for fake and misleading news to spread and exert influence. This paper examines the performance of different reputation algorithms when applied to a large and statistically significant portion of the news that are spread via Twitter. Our main result is that simple crowdsourcing-based algorithms are able to identify a large portion of fake or misleading news, while incurring only very low false positive rates for mainstream websites. We believe that these algorithms can be used as the basis of practical, large-scale systems for indicating to consumers which…
$\textit{Fake followers}$ are those Twitter accounts specifically created to inflate the number of followers of a target account. Fake followers are dangerous for the social platform and beyond, since they may alter concepts like popularity and influence in the Twittersphere - hence impacting on economy, politics, and society. In this paper, we contribute along different dimensions. First, we review some of the most relevant existing features and rules (proposed by Academia and Media) for anomalous Twitter accounts detection. Second, we create a baseline dataset of verified human and fake foll…
As the novel coronavirus spread globally, a growing public panic was expressed over the internet. We examine the public discussion concerning COVID-19 on Twitter. We use a dataset of 67 million tweets from 12 million users collected between January 29, 2020 and March 4, 2020. We categorize users based on their home countries, social identities, and political orientation. We find that news media, government officials, and individual news reporters posted a majority of influential tweets, while the most influential ones are still written by regular users. Tweets mentioning "fake news" URLs and d…
Social networks offer a ready channel for fake and misleading news to spread and exert influence. This paper examines the performance of different reputation algorithms when applied to a large and statistically significant portion of the news that are spread via Twitter. Our main result is that simple algorithms based on the identity of the users spreading the news, as well as the words appearing in the titles and descriptions of the linked articles, are able to identify a large portion of fake or misleading news, while incurring only very low (<1%) false positive rates for mainstream websites…
The advent of social media changed the way we consume content favoring a disintermediated access and production. This scenario has been matter of critical discussion about its impact on society. Magnified in the case of Arab Spring or heavily criticized in the Brexit and 2016 U.S. elections. In this work we explore information consumption on Twitter during the last European electoral campaign by analyzing the interaction patterns of official news sources, fake news sources, politicians, people from the showbiz and many others. We extensively explore interactions among different classes of acco…
In 2010, a paper entitled "From Obscurity to Prominence in Minutes: Political Speech and Real-time search" won the Best Paper Prize of the Web Science 2010 Conference. Among its findings were the discovery and documentation of what was termed a "Twitter-bomb", an organized effort to spread misinformation about the democratic candidate Martha Coakley through anonymous Twitter accounts. In this paper, after summarizing the details of that event, we outline the recipe of how social networks are used to spread misinformation. One of the most important steps in such a recipe is the "infiltration" o…
The micro-blogging platform Twitter allows its nearly 320 million monthly active users to build a network of follower connections to other Twitter users (i.e., followees) in order to subscribe to content posted by these users. With this feature, Twitter has become one of the most popular social networks on the Web and was also the first platform that offered the concept of hashtags. Hashtags are freely-chosen keywords, which start with the hash character, to annotate, categorize and contextualize Twitter posts (i.e., tweets). Although hashtags are widely accepted and used by the Twitter commun…
Social networking and micro-blogging services, such as Twitter, play an important role in sharing digital information. Despite the popularity and usefulness of social media, they are regularly abused by corrupt users. One of these nefarious activities is so-called fake news -- a "virus" that has been spreading rapidly thanks to the hospitable environment provided by social media platforms. The extensive spread of fake news is now becoming a major problem with far-reaching negative repercussions on both individuals and society. Hence, the identification of fake news on social media is a problem…
Micro-blogs are contemporary broadcasting services for exchanging small elements of content, including video and images. Despite its popularity, micro-blogging is not without issues. So far, various security concerns, such as: privacy and confidentiality of micro-blogging systems have attracted the interest of the scientific community. Nevertheless, in this document we refer to a security issue that is concerned with the posting and circulation of fake messages. With the aim to make micro-blogs a credible source of information, in this work we propose a protocol, as a solution, that can be eas…
The spread of fake news has long been a social issue and the necessity of identifying it has become evident since its dangers are well recognized. In addition to causing uneasiness among the public, it has even more devastating consequences. For instance, it might lead to death during pandemics due to unverified medical instructions. This study aims to build a model for identifying fake news using graphs and machine learning algorithms. Instead of scanning the news content or user information, the research explicitly focuses on the spreading network, which shows the interconnection among peopl…
Social networks play a significant role in today's world. The importance of social networks, for example Facebook or Twitter, are undeniable. However, they also have many issues. One of which is the need for a defense mechanism against fake accounts. It is obviously not a trivial task to separate fake accounts from authentic ones. In this paper, we propose a ranking scheme, comprising of both graph based and feature based approaches to aid the detection of fake Facebook profiles. Utilizing Support Vector Machine (SVM) \cite{cortes1995} and SybilWalk \cite{JWZ17}, the model achieved high accura…
An important challenge in the process of tracking and detecting the dissemination of misinformation is to understand the political gap between people that engage with the so called "fake news". A possible factor responsible for this gap is opinion polarization, which may prompt the general public to classify content that they disagree or want to discredit as fake. In this work, we study the relationship between political polarization and content reported by Twitter users as related to "fake news". We investigate how polarization may create distinct narratives on what misinformation actually is…
This paper presents a method to validate the true patrons of a brand, group, artist or any other entity on the social networking site Twitter. We analyze the trend of total number of tweets, average retweets and total number of followers for various nodes for different social and political backgrounds. We argue that average retweets to follower ratio reveals the overall value of the individual accounts and helps estimate the true to fake account ratio.
University Politehnica of Bucharest（布加勒斯特理工大学）；Aarhus University（奥胡斯大学）
The growing popularity of social media platforms has simplified the creation and distribution of news articles but also creates a conduit for spreading fake news. In consequence, the need arises for effective context-aware fake news detection mechanisms, where the contextual information can be built either from the textual content of posts or from available social data (e.g., information about the users, reactions to posts, or the social network). In this paper, we propose DANES, a Deep Neural Network Ensemble Architecture for Social and Textual Context-aware Fake News Detection. DANES compris…
Detecting fake users (also called Sybils) in online social networks is a basic security research problem. State-of-the-art approaches rely on a large amount of manually labeled users as a training set. These approaches suffer from three key limitations: 1) it is time-consuming and costly to manually label a large training set, 2) they cannot detect new Sybils in a timely fashion, and 3) they are vulnerable to Sybil attacks that leverage information of the training set. In this work, we propose SybilBlind, a structure-based Sybil detection framework that does not rely on a manually labeled trai…
An important aspect of preventing fake news dissemination is to proactively detect the likelihood of its spreading. Research in the domain of fake news spreader detection has not been explored much from a network analysis perspective. In this paper, we propose a graph neural network based approach to identify nodes that are likely to become spreaders of false information. Using the community health assessment model and interpersonal trust we propose an inductive representation learning framework to predict nodes of densely-connected community structures that are most likely to spread fake news…
To combat fake news, researchers mostly focused on detecting fake news and journalists built and maintained fact-checking sites (e.g., Snopes.com and Politifact.com). However, fake news dissemination has been greatly promoted via social media sites, and these fact-checking sites have not been fully utilized. To overcome these problems and complement existing methods against fake news, in this paper we propose a deep-learning based fact-checking URL recommender system to mitigate impact of fake news in social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook. In particular, our proposed framework consis…
Pathogenic Social Media (PSM) accounts such as terrorist supporter accounts and fake news writers have the capability of spreading disinformation to viral proportions. Early detection of PSM accounts is crucial as they are likely to be key users to make malicious information "viral". In this paper, we adopt the causal inference framework along with graph-based metrics in order to distinguish PSMs from normal users within a short time of their activities. We propose both supervised and semi-supervised approaches without taking the network information and content into account. Results on a real-…
Saginaw Valley State University（萨吉诺谷州立大学）；The Hashemite University（哈希姆大学）；Western Michigan University（西密歇根大学）；University of Nebraska at Kearney（内布拉斯加大学卡尼尔分校）
Online news and information sources are convenient and accessible ways to learn about current issues. For instance, more than 300 million people engage with posts on Twitter globally, which provides the possibility to disseminate misleading information. There are numerous cases where violent crimes have been committed due to fake news. This research presents the CovidMis20 dataset (COVID-19 Misinformation 2020 dataset), which consists of 1,375,592 tweets collected from February to July 2020. CovidMis20 can be automatically updated to fetch the latest news and is publicly available at: https://…
In the past decade, the social networks platforms and micro-blogging sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Weibo have become an integral part of our day-to-day activities and is widely used all over the world by billions of users to share their views and circulate information in the form of messages, pictures, and videos. These are even used by government agencies to spread important information through their verified Facebook accounts and official Twitter handles, as they can reach a huge population within a limited time window. However, many deceptive activities like propaganda and…
Fraud has severely detrimental impacts on the business of social networks and other online applications. A user can become a fake celebrity by purchasing "zombie followers" on Twitter. A merchant can boost his reputation through fake reviews on Amazon. This phenomenon also conspicuously exists on Facebook, Yelp and TripAdvisor, etc. In all the cases, fraudsters try to manipulate the platform's ranking mechanism by faking interactions between the fake accounts they control and the target customers.
From conspiracy theories to fake cures and fake treatments, COVID-19 has become a hot-bed for the spread of misinformation online. It is more important than ever to identify methods to debunk and correct false information online. In this paper, we present a methodology and analyses to characterize the two competing COVID-19 misinformation communities online: (i) misinformed users or users who are actively posting misinformation, and (ii) informed users or users who are actively spreading true information, or calling out misinformation. The goals of this study are two-fold: (i) collecting a div…
Social media is interactive, and interaction brings misinformation. With the growing amount of user-generated data, fake news on online platforms has become much frequent since the arrival of social networks. Now and then, an event occurs and becomes the topic of discussion, generating and propagating false information. Existing literature studying fake news primarily elaborates on fake news classification models. Approaches exploring fake news characteristics and ways to distinguish it from real news are minimal. Not many researches have focused on statistical testing and generating new facto…
State-sponsored "bad actors" increasingly weaponize social media platforms to launch cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns during elections. Social media companies, due to their rapid growth and scale, struggle to prevent the weaponization of their platforms. This study conducts an automated spear phishing and disinformation campaign on Twitter ahead of the 2018 United States Midterm Elections. A fake news bot account - the @DCNewsReport - was created and programmed to automatically send customized tweets with a "breaking news" link to 138 Twitter users, before being restricted by Twitter.…
2018 started with massive protests in Iran, bringing back the impressions of the so called "Arab Spring" and it's revolutionary impact for the Maghreb states, Syria and Egypt. Many reports and scientific examinations considered online social networks (OSN's) such as Twitter or Facebook to play a critical role in the opinion making of people behind those protests. Beside that, there is also evidence for directed manipulation of opinion with the help of social bots and fake accounts. So, it is obvious to ask, if there is an attempt to manipulate the opinion-making process related to the Iranian …
The spread of coronavirus and anti-vaccine conspiracies online hindered public health responses to the pandemic. We examined the content of external articles shared on Twitter from February to June 2020 to understand how conspiracy theories and fake news competed with legitimate sources of information. Examining external content--articles, rather than social media posts--is a novel methodology that allows for non-social media specific analysis of misinformation, tracking of changing narratives over time, and determining which types of resources (government, news, scientific, or dubious) domina…
Georgia Tech（佐治亚理工学院）；Georgia State University（佐治亚州立大学）
We propose the first multistage intervention framework that tackles fake news in social networks by combining reinforcement learning with a point process network activity model. The spread of fake news and mitigation events within the network is modeled by a multivariate Hawkes process with additional exogenous control terms. By choosing a feature representation of states, defining mitigation actions and constructing reward functions to measure the effectiveness of mitigation activities, we map the problem of fake news mitigation into the reinforcement learning framework. We develop a policy i…
Fake news that manipulates political elections, strikes financial systems, and even incites riots is more viral than real news online, resulting in unstable societies and buffeted democracy. The easier contagion of fake news online can be causally explained by the greater anger it carries. The same results in Twitter and Weibo indicate that this mechanism is independent of the platform. Moreover, mutations in emotions like increasing anger will progressively speed up the information spread. Specifically, increasing the occupation of anger by 0.1 and reducing that of joy by 0.1 will produce nea…
Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto（波尔图大学工程学院）；University of Porto（波尔图大学）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）
Our work represents another step into the detection and prevention of these ever-more present political manipulation efforts. We, therefore, start by focusing on understanding what the state-of-the-art approaches lack -- since the problem remains, this is a fair assumption. We find concerning issues within the current literature and follow a diverging path. Notably, by placing emphasis on using data features that are less susceptible to malicious manipulation and also on looking for high-level approaches that avoid a granularity level that is biased towards easy-to-spot and low impact cases. W…
TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology（莱布尼茨科学技术信息中心）；L3S Research Center, Leibniz University Hannover（汉诺威莱布尼茨大学L3S研究中心）
Fake news on social media has become a hot topic of research as it negatively impacts the discourse of real news in the public. Specifically, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has seen a rise of inaccurate and misleading information due to the surrounding controversies and unknown details at the beginning of the pandemic. The FakeNews task at MediaEval 2020 tackles this problem by creating a challenge to automatically detect tweets containing misinformation based on text and structure from Twitter follower network. In this paper, we present a simple approach that uses BERT embeddings and a shallow…
Social media can be a double-edged sword for society, either as a convenient channel exchanging ideas or as an unexpected conduit circulating fake news through a large population. While existing studies of fake news focus on theoretical modeling of propagation or identification methods based on machine learning, it is important to understand the realistic mechanisms between theoretical models and black-box methods. Here we track large databases of fake news and real news in both, Weibo in China and Twitter in Japan from different culture, which include their complete traces of re-postings. We …
Fake news are affecting a large proportion of the population even becoming a danger to the society. Mostly, this disinformation flow take place through Internet. Being aware of that problem, in this work we propose a synthetic indicator that measures the user reputation in Twitter in order to analyze the credibility of the content in this social network. In order to show the indicator utility, we have analyzed data from some political topics in Spain from 2019 to 2020 and we have checked that bots plays a decisive role into the spread of news and, as might be expected, the link among popularit…
False information and true information fact checking it, often co-exist in social networks, each competing to influence people in their spread paths. An efficient strategy here to contain false information is to proactively identify if nodes in the spread path are likely to endorse false information (i.e. further spread it) or refutation information (thereby help contain false information spreading). In this paper, we propose SCARLET (truSt and Credibility bAsed gRaph neuraL nEtwork model using aTtention) to predict likely action of nodes in the spread path. We aggregate trust and credibility …
Twitter has increasingly become a popular platform to share news and user opinion. A tweet is considered to be important if it receives high number of affirmative reactions from other Twitter users via Retweets. Retweet count is thus considered as a surrogate measure for positive crowd-sourced reactions - high number of retweets of a tweet aid in making its topic trending. This in turn bolsters the social reputation of the author of the tweet. Since social reputation/impact of users/tweets influences many decisions (such as promoting brands, advertisement etc.), several blackmarket syndicates …
The spread of fake news on online social networks (OSNs) has become a matter of concern. These platforms are also used for propagating important authentic information. Thus, there is a need for mitigating fake news without significantly influencing the spread of real news. We leverage users' inherent capabilities of identifying fake news and propose a warning-based control mechanism to curb this spread. Warnings are based on previous users' responses that indicate the authenticity of the news. We use population-size dependent continuous-time multi-type branching processes to describe the sprea…
Today's social media platforms enable to spread both authentic and fake news very quickly. Some approaches have been proposed to automatically detect such "fake" news based on their content, but it is difficult to agree on universal criteria of authenticity (which can be bypassed by adversaries once known). Besides, it is obviously impossible to have each news item checked by a human. In this paper, we a mechanism to limit the spread of fake news which is not based on content. It can be implemented as a plugin on a social media platform. The principle is as follows: a team of fact-checkers rev…
Two clustering methods to determine users with similar opinions on the Covid-19 pandemic and the related public debate in Germany will be presented in this paper. We believe, they can help gaining an overview over similar-minded groups and could support the prevention of fake-news distribution. The first method uses a new approach to create a network based on retweet relationships between users and the most retweeted users, the so-called influencers. The second method extracts hashtags from users posts to create a "user feature vector" which is then clustered, using a consensus matrix based on…
The blooming of fake news on social networks has devastating impacts on society, economy, and public security. Although numerous studies are conducted for the automatic detection of fake news, the majority tend to utilize deep neural networks to learn event-specific features for superior detection performance on specific datasets. However, the trained models heavily rely on the training datasets and are infeasible to apply to upcoming events due to the discrepancy between event distributions. Inspired by domain adaptation theories, we propose an end-to-end adversarial adaptation network, dubbe…
The dissemination of fake news intended to deceive people, influence public opinion and manipulate social outcomes, has become a pressing problem on social media. Moreover, information sharing on social media facilitates diffusion of viral information cascades. In this work, we focus on understanding and leveraging diffusion dynamics of false and legitimate contents in order to facilitate network interventions for fake news mitigation. We analyze real-world Twitter datasets comprising fake and true news cascades, to understand differences in diffusion dynamics and user behaviours with regards …
To mitigate the spread of fake news, researchers need to understand who visit fake new sites, what brings people to those sites, where visitors come from, and what content they prefer to consume. In this paper, we analyze web traffic data from The Gateway Pundit (TGP), a popular far-right website that is known for repeatedly sharing false information that has made its web traffic available to the general public. We collect data on 68 million web traffic visits to the site over a month period and analyze how people consume news via multiple features. Our traffic analysis shows that search engin…
