IDENTIFYING POSSIBLE RUMOR SPREADERS ON TWITTER USING THE SVM AND FEATURE LEVEL EXTRACTION

In everyday life, many events occur and give rise to various kinds of information, which are also rumors. Rumors can cause fear and influence public opinion about the event in question. Identifying possible rumor spreaders is extremely helpful in preventing the spread of rumors. Feature extraction can be done to expand the feature set, which consists of conversational features in the form of social networks formed from user replies, user features such as following, tweet count, verified, etc., and tweet features with text analysis such as punctuation and sentiment values. These features become instances used for classification. This study aims to identify possible spreaders of rumors on Twitter with the SVM classification model. This instance-based classification algorithm is good for linear and non-linear classification. In the non-linear classification, additional kernels are used, such as linear, RBF, and sigmoid. The research focuses on getting the best model with high performance values from all the models and kernel functions that have been defined. It was found that the SVM classification model with the RBF kernel has a high overall performance value for each data combination with a ratio of the amount of data is 1:1 or the difference is very large. This model gives accurate results with an average of 97.02%. With a wide distribution of data, the SVM classification model with the RBF kernel is able to map the data properly

Rumour Veracity Estimation with Deep Learning for Twitter

Part 4: Security, Privacy, Ethics and MisinformationInternational audienceTwitter has become a fertile ground for rumours as information can propagate to too many people in very short time. Rumours can create panic in public and hence timely detection and blocking of rumour information is urgently required. We proposed and compare machine learning classifiers with a deep learning model using Recurrent Neural Networks for classification of tweets into rumour and non-rumour classes. A total thirteen features based on tweet text and user characteristics were given as input to machine learning classifiers. Deep learning model was trained and tested with textual features and five user characteristic features. The findings indicate that our models perform much better than machine learning based models

Misinformation Detection in Social Media

abstract: The pervasive use of social media gives it a crucial role in helping the public perceive reliable information. Meanwhile, the openness and timeliness of social networking sites also allow for the rapid creation and dissemination of misinformation. It becomes increasingly difficult for online users to find accurate and trustworthy information. As witnessed in recent incidents of misinformation, it escalates quickly and can impact social media users with undesirable consequences and wreak havoc instantaneously. Different from some existing research in psychology and social sciences about misinformation, social media platforms pose unprecedented challenges for misinformation detection. First, intentional spreaders of misinformation will actively disguise themselves. Second, content of misinformation may be manipulated to avoid being detected, while abundant contextual information may play a vital role in detecting it. Third, not only accuracy, earliness of a detection method is also important in containing misinformation from being viral. Fourth, social media platforms have been used as a fundamental data source for various disciplines, and these research may have been conducted in the presence of misinformation. To tackle the challenges, we focus on developing machine learning algorithms that are robust to adversarial manipulation and data scarcity. The main objective of this dissertation is to provide a systematic study of misinformation detection in social media. To tackle the challenges of adversarial attacks, I propose adaptive detection algorithms to deal with the active manipulations of misinformation spreaders via content and networks. To facilitate content-based approaches, I analyze the contextual data of misinformation and propose to incorporate the specific contextual patterns of misinformation into a principled detection framework. Considering its rapidly growing nature, I study how misinformation can be detected at an early stage. In particular, I focus on the challenge of data scarcity and propose a novel framework to enable historical data to be utilized for emerging incidents that are seemingly irrelevant. With misinformation being viral, applications that rely on social media data face the challenge of corrupted data. To this end, I present robust statistical relational learning and personalization algorithms to minimize the negative effect of misinformation.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Computer Science 201