Social media has become a popular means for people to consume and share the news. At the same time, however, it has also enabled the wide dissemination of fake news, that is, news with intentionally false information, causing significant negative effects on society. To mitigate this problem, the research of fake news detection has recently received a lot of attention. Despite several existing computational solutions on the detection of fake news, the lack of comprehensive and community-driven fake news data sets has become one of major roadblocks. Not only existing data sets are scarce, they do not contain a myriad of features often required in the study such as news content, social context, and spatiotemporal information. Therefore, in this article, to facilitate fake news-related research, we present a fake news data repository FakeNewsNet, which contains two comprehensive data sets with diverse features in news content, social context, and spatiotemporal information. We present a comprehensive description of the FakeNewsNet, demonstrate an exploratory analysis of two data sets from different perspectives, and discuss the benefits of the FakeNewsNet for potential applications on fake news study on social media.

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FakeNewsNet: A Data Repository with News Content, Social Context, and Spatiotemporal Information for Studying Fake News on Social Media

DeepFakes and Beyond: A Survey of Face Manipulation and Fake Detection

In recent years, to mitigate the problem of fake news, computational detection of fake news has been studied, producing some promising early results. While important, however, we argue that a critical missing piece of the study be the explainability of such detection, i.e., why a particular piece of news is detected as fake. In this paper, therefore, we study the explainable detection of fake news. We develop a sentence-comment co-attention sub-network to exploit both news contents and user comments to jointly capture explainable top-k check-worthy sentences and user comments for fake news detection. We conduct extensive experiments on real-world datasets and demonstrate that the proposed method not only significantly outperforms 7 state-of-the-art fake news detection methods by at least 5.33% in F1-score, but also (concurrently) identifies top-k user comments that explain why a news piece is fake, better than baselines by 28.2% in NDCG and 30.7% in Precision.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3292500.3330935

dEFEND: Explainable Fake News Detection

The explosive growth in fake news and its erosion to democracy, justice, and public trust has increased the demand for fake news detection and intervention. This survey reviews and evaluates methods that can detect fake news from four perspectives: the false knowledge it carries, its writing style, its propagation patterns, and the credibility of its source. The survey also highlights some potential research tasks based on the review. In particular, we identify and detail related fundamental theories across various disciplines to encourage interdisciplinary research on fake news. It is our hope that this survey can facilitate collaborative efforts among experts in computer and information sciences, social sciences, political science, and journalism to research fake news, where such efforts can lead to fake news detection that is not only efficient but, more importantly, explainable.

A Survey of Fake News: Fundamental Theories, Detection Methods, and Opportunities

A survey on fake news and rumour detection techniques

Nowadays social media is widely used as the source of information because of its low cost, easy to access nature. However, consuming news from social media is a double-edged sword because of the wide propagation of fake news, i.e., news with intentionally false information. Fake news is a serious problem because it has negative impacts on individuals as well as society large. In the social media the information is spread fast and hence detection mechanism should be able to predict news fast enough to stop the dissemination of fake news. Therefore, detecting fake news on social media is an extremely important and also a technically challenging problem. In this paper, we present FakeNewsTracker, a system for fake news understanding and detection. As we will show, FakeNewsTracker can automatically collect data for news pieces and social context, which benefits further research of understanding and predicting fake news with effective visualization techniques.

FakeNewsTracker: a tool for fake news collection, detection, and visualization

Social media has become a popular means for people to consume news. Meanwhile, it also enables the wide dissemination of fake news, i.e., news with intentionally false information, which brings significant negative effects to the society. Thus, fake news detection is attracting increasing attention. However, fake news detection is a non-trivial task, which requires multi-source information such as news content, social context, and dynamic information. First, fake news is written to fool people, which makes it difficult to detect fake news simply based on news contents. In addition to news contents, we need to explore social contexts such as user engagements and social behaviors. For example, a credible user's comment that "this is a fake news" is a strong signal for detecting fake news. Second, dynamic information such as how fake news and true news propagate and how users' opinions toward news pieces are very important for extracting useful patterns for (early) fake news detection and intervention. Thus, comprehensive datasets which contain news content, social context, and dynamic information could facilitate fake news propagation, detection, and mitigation; while to the best of our knowledge, existing datasets only contains one or two aspects. Therefore, in this paper, to facilitate fake news related researches, we provide a fake news data repository FakeNewsNet, which contains two comprehensive datasets that includes news content, social context, and dynamic information. We present a comprehensive description of datasets collection, demonstrate an exploratory analysis of this data repository from different perspectives, and discuss the benefits of FakeNewsNet for potential applications on fake news study on social media.

FakeNewsNet: A Data Repository with News Content, Social Context and Spatialtemporal Information for Studying Fake News on Social Media

Consuming news from social media is becoming increasingly popular. However, social media also enables the widespread of fake news. Because of its detrimental effects brought by social media, fake news detection has attracted increasing attention. However, the performance of detecting fake news only from news content is generally limited as fake news pieces are written to mimic true news. In the real world, news pieces spread through propagation networks on social media. The news propagation networks usually involve multi-levels. In this paper, we study the challenging problem of investigating and exploiting news hierarchical propagation network on social media for fake news detection. 
In an attempt to understand the correlations between news propagation networks and fake news, first, we build a hierarchical propagation network from macro-level and micro-level of fake news and true news; second, we perform a comparative analysis of the propagation network features of linguistic, structural and temporal perspectives between fake and real news, which demonstrates the potential of utilizing these features to detect fake news; third, we show the effectiveness of these propagation network features for fake news detection. We further validate the effectiveness of these features from feature important analysis. Altogether, this work presents a data-driven view of hierarchical propagation network and fake news and paves the way towards a healthier online news ecosystem.

Hierarchical Propagation Networks for Fake News Detection: Investigation and Exploitation

Consuming news from social media is becoming increasingly popular However, social media also enables the wide dissemination of fake news Because of the detrimental effects of fake news, fake news detection has attracted increasing attention However, the performance of detecting fake news only from news content is generally limited as fake news pieces are written to mimic true news In the real world, news pieces spread through propagation networks on social media The news propagation networks usually involve multi-levels In this paper, we study the challenging problem of investigating and exploiting news hierarchical propagation network on social media for fake news detectionIn an attempt to understand the correlations between news propagation networks and fake news, first, we build hierarchical propagation networks for fake news and true news pieces; second, we perform a comparative analysis of the propagation network features from structural, temporal, and linguistic perspectives between fake and real news, which demonstrates the potential of utilizing these features to detect fake news; third, we show the effectiveness of these propagation network features for fake news detection We further validate the effectiveness of these features from feature importance analysis We conduct extensive experiments on real-world datasets and demonstrate the proposed features can significantly outperform state-of-the-art fake news detection methods by at least 17% with an average F1>084 Altogether, this work presents a data-driven view of hierarchical propagation network and fake news and paves the way towards a healthier online news ecosystem

Deepak Mahudeswaran

Papers

FakeNewsNet: A Data Repository with News Content, Social Context, and Spatiotemporal Information for Studying Fake News on Social Media

FakeNewsTracker: a tool for fake news collection, detection, and visualization

FakeNewsNet: A Data Repository with News Content, Social Context and Spatialtemporal Information for Studying Fake News on Social Media

Hierarchical Propagation Networks for Fake News Detection: Investigation and Exploitation

Hierarchical propagation networks for fake news detection: Investigation and exploitation