118 research outputs found
False News On Social Media: A Data-Driven Survey
In the past few years, the research community has dedicated growing interest
to the issue of false news circulating on social networks. The widespread
attention on detecting and characterizing false news has been motivated by
considerable backlashes of this threat against the real world. As a matter of
fact, social media platforms exhibit peculiar characteristics, with respect to
traditional news outlets, which have been particularly favorable to the
proliferation of deceptive information. They also present unique challenges for
all kind of potential interventions on the subject. As this issue becomes of
global concern, it is also gaining more attention in academia. The aim of this
survey is to offer a comprehensive study on the recent advances in terms of
detection, characterization and mitigation of false news that propagate on
social media, as well as the challenges and the open questions that await
future research on the field. We use a data-driven approach, focusing on a
classification of the features that are used in each study to characterize
false information and on the datasets used for instructing classification
methods. At the end of the survey, we highlight emerging approaches that look
most promising for addressing false news
Rumor Stance Classification in Online Social Networks: A Survey on the State-of-the-Art, Prospects, and Future Challenges
The emergence of the Internet as a ubiquitous technology has facilitated the
rapid evolution of social media as the leading virtual platform for
communication, content sharing, and information dissemination. In spite of
revolutionizing the way news used to be delivered to people, this technology
has also brought along with itself inevitable demerits. One such drawback is
the spread of rumors facilitated by social media platforms which may provoke
doubt and fear upon people. Therefore, the need to debunk rumors before their
wide spread has become essential all the more. Over the years, many studies
have been conducted to develop effective rumor verification systems. One aspect
of such studies focuses on rumor stance classification, which concerns the task
of utilizing users' viewpoints about a rumorous post to better predict the
veracity of a rumor. Relying on users' stances in rumor verification task has
gained great importance, for it has shown significant improvements in the model
performances. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive literature review on
rumor stance classification in complex social networks. In particular, we
present a thorough description of the approaches and mark the top performances.
Moreover, we introduce multiple datasets available for this purpose and
highlight their limitations. Finally, some challenges and future directions are
discussed to stimulate further relevant research efforts.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figures, journa
An Exploratory Study of COVID-19 Misinformation on Twitter
During the COVID-19 pandemic, social media has become a home ground for
misinformation. To tackle this infodemic, scientific oversight, as well as a
better understanding by practitioners in crisis management, is needed. We have
conducted an exploratory study into the propagation, authors and content of
misinformation on Twitter around the topic of COVID-19 in order to gain early
insights. We have collected all tweets mentioned in the verdicts of
fact-checked claims related to COVID-19 by over 92 professional fact-checking
organisations between January and mid-July 2020 and share this corpus with the
community. This resulted in 1 500 tweets relating to 1 274 false and 276
partially false claims, respectively. Exploratory analysis of author accounts
revealed that the verified twitter handle(including Organisation/celebrity) are
also involved in either creating (new tweets) or spreading (retweet) the
misinformation. Additionally, we found that false claims propagate faster than
partially false claims. Compare to a background corpus of COVID-19 tweets,
tweets with misinformation are more often concerned with discrediting other
information on social media. Authors use less tentative language and appear to
be more driven by concerns of potential harm to others. Our results enable us
to suggest gaps in the current scientific coverage of the topic as well as
propose actions for authorities and social media users to counter
misinformation.Comment: 20 pages, nine figures, four tables. Submitted for peer review,
revision
Fake News Detection Through Graph-based Neural Networks: A Survey
The popularity of online social networks has enabled rapid dissemination of
information. People now can share and consume information much more rapidly
than ever before. However, low-quality and/or accidentally/deliberately fake
information can also spread rapidly. This can lead to considerable and negative
impacts on society. Identifying, labelling and debunking online misinformation
as early as possible has become an increasingly urgent problem. Many methods
have been proposed to detect fake news including many deep learning and
graph-based approaches. In recent years, graph-based methods have yielded
strong results, as they can closely model the social context and propagation
process of online news. In this paper, we present a systematic review of fake
news detection studies based on graph-based and deep learning-based techniques.
We classify existing graph-based methods into knowledge-driven methods,
propagation-based methods, and heterogeneous social context-based methods,
depending on how a graph structure is constructed to model news related
information flows. We further discuss the challenges and open problems in
graph-based fake news detection and identify future research directions.Comment: 18 pages, 3 tables, 7 figure
Combating Fake News on Social Media: A Framework, Review, and Future Opportunities
Social media platforms facilitate the sharing of a vast magnitude of information in split seconds among users. However, some false information is also widely spread, generally referred to as “fake news”. This can have major negative impacts on individuals and societies. Unfortunately, people are often not able to correctly identify fake news from truth. Therefore, there is an urgent need to find effective mechanisms to fight fake news on social media. To this end, this paper adapts the Straub Model of Security Action Cycle to the context of combating fake news on social media. It uses the adapted framework to classify the vast literature on fake news to action cycle phases (i.e., deterrence, prevention, detection, and mitigation/remedy). Based on a systematic and inter-disciplinary review of the relevant literature, we analyze the status and challenges in each stage of combating fake news, followed by introducing future research directions. These efforts allow the development of a holistic view of the research frontier on fighting fake news online. We conclude that this is a multidisciplinary issue; and as such, a collaborative effort from different fields is needed to effectively address this problem
Cascading Behaviour in Complex Soci-Technical Networks
Most human interactions today take place with the mediation of information and communications technology. This is extending the boundaries of interdependence: the group of reference, ideas and behaviour to which people are exposed is larger and less restricted to old geographical and cultural boundaries; but it is also providing more and better data with which to build more informative models on the effects of social interactions, amongst them, the way in which contagion and cascades diffuse in social networks. Online data are not only helping us gain deeper insights into the structural complexity of social systems, they are also illuminating the consequences of that complexity, especially around collective and temporal dynamics. This paper offers an overview of the models and applications that have been developed in what is still a nascent area of research, as well as an outline of immediate lines of work that promise to open new vistas in our understanding of cascading behaviour in social networks
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