Topology comparison of Twitter diffusion networks effectively reveals misleading information

In recent years, malicious information had an explosive growth in social media, with serious social and political backlashes. Recent important studies, featuring large-scale analyses, have produced deeper knowledge about this phenomenon, showing that misleading information spreads faster, deeper and more broadly than factual information on social media, where echo chambers, algorithmic and human biases play an important role in diffusion networks. Following these directions, we explore the possibility of classifying news articles circulating on social media based exclusively on a topological analysis of their diffusion networks. To this aim we collected a large dataset of diffusion networks on Twitter pertaining to news articles published on two distinct classes of sources, namely outlets that convey mainstream, reliable and objective information and those that fabricate and disseminate various kinds of misleading articles, including false news intended to harm, satire intended to make people laugh, click-bait news that may be entirely factual or rumors that are unproven. We carried out an extensive comparison of these networks using several alignment-free approaches including basic network properties, centrality measures distributions, and network distances. We accordingly evaluated to what extent these techniques allow to discriminate between the networks associated to the aforementioned news domains. Our results highlight that the communities of users spreading mainstream news, compared to those sharing misleading news, tend to shape diffusion networks with subtle yet systematic differences which might be effectively employed to identify misleading and harmful information.Comment: A revised new version is available on Scientific Report

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

PopRank: Ranking pages' impact and users' engagement on Facebook

Users online tend to acquire information adhering to their system of beliefs and to ignore dissenting information. Such dynamics might affect page popularity. In this paper we introduce an algorithm, that we call PopRank, to assess both the Impact of Facebook pages as well as users' Engagement on the basis of their mutual interactions. The ideas behind the PopRank are that i) high impact pages attract many users with a low engagement, which means that they receive comments from users that rarely comment, and ii) high engagement users interact with high impact pages, that is they mostly comment pages with a high popularity. The resulting ranking of pages can predict the number of comments a page will receive and the number of its posts. Pages impact turns out to be slightly dependent on pages' informative content (e.g., science vs conspiracy) but independent of users' polarization.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figure

The Fake News Spreading Plague: Was it Preventable?

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" of a community of users who are already engaged in conversations about a topic, to use them as organic spreaders of misinformation in their extended subnetworks. Then, we take this misinformation spreading recipe and indicate how it was successfully used to spread fake news during the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. The main differences between the scenarios are the use of Facebook instead of Twitter, and the respective motivations (in 2010: political influence; in 2016: financial benefit through online advertising). After situating these events in the broader context of exploiting the Web, we seize this opportunity to address limitations of the reach of research findings and to start a conversation about how communities of researchers can increase their impact on real-world societal issues