Despite the increasing use of social media platforms for information and news gathering, its unmoderated nature often leads to the emergence and spread of rumours, i.e., items of information that are unverified at the time of posting. At the same time, the openness of social media platforms provides opportunities to study how users share and discuss rumours, and to explore how to automatically assess their veracity, using natural language processing and data mining techniques. In this article, we introduce and discuss two types of rumours that circulate on social media: long-standing rumours that circulate for long periods of time, and newly emerging rumours spawned during fast-paced events such as breaking news, where reports are released piecemeal and often with an unverified status in their early stages. We provide an overview of research into social media rumours with the ultimate goal of developing a rumour classification system that consists of four components: rumour detection, rumour tracking, rumour stance classification, and rumour veracity classification. We delve into the approaches presented in the scientific literature for the development of each of these four components. We summarise the efforts and achievements so far toward the development of rumour classification systems and conclude with suggestions for avenues for future research in social media mining for the detection and resolution of rumours.

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Detection and Resolution of Rumours in Social Media: A Survey

FNDNet – A deep convolutional neural network for fake news detection

Despite the increasing use of social media platforms for information and news gathering, its unmoderated nature often leads to the emergence and spread of rumours, i.e. pieces of information that are unverified at the time of posting. At the same time, the openness of social media platforms provides opportunities to study how users share and discuss rumours, and to explore how natural language processing and data mining techniques may be used to find ways of determining their veracity. In this survey we introduce and discuss two types of rumours that circulate on social media; long-standing rumours that circulate for long periods of time, and newly-emerging rumours spawned during fast-paced events such as breaking news, where reports are released piecemeal and often with an unverified status in their early stages. We provide an overview of research into social media rumours with the ultimate goal of developing a rumour classification system that consists of four components: rumour detection, rumour tracking, rumour stance classification and rumour veracity classification. We delve into the approaches presented in the scientific literature for the development of each of these four components. We summarise the efforts and achievements so far towards the development of rumour classification systems and conclude with suggestions for avenues for future research in social media mining for detection and resolution of rumours.

Tools that are able to detect unverified information posted on social media during a news event can help to avoid the spread of rumours that turn out to be false. In this paper we compare a novel approach using Conditional Random Fields that learns from the sequential dynamics of social media posts with the current state-of-the-art rumour detection system, as well as other baselines. In contrast to existing work, our classifier does not need to observe tweets querying the stance of a post to deem it a rumour but, instead, exploits context learned during the event. Our classifier has improved precision and recall over the state-of-the-art classifier that relies on querying tweets, as well as outperforming our best baseline. Moreover, the results provide evidence for the generalisability of our classifier.

/pdf/exploiting-context-for-rumour-detection-in-social-media-ysdcz2gc69.pdf

Exploiting Context for Rumour Detection in Social Media

Breaking news leads to situations of fast-paced reporting in social media, producing all kinds of updates related to news stories, albeit with the caveat that some of those early updates tend to be rumours, ie, information with an unverified status at the time of posting Flagging information that is unverified can be helpful to avoid the spread of information that may turn out to be false Detection of rumours can also feed a rumour tracking system that ultimately determines their veracity In this paper we introduce a novel approach to rumour detection that learns from the sequential dynamics of reporting during breaking news in social media to detect rumours in new stories Using Twitter datasets collected during five breaking news stories, we experiment with Conditional Random Fields as a sequential classifier that leverages context learnt during an event for rumour detection, which we compare with the state-of-the-art rumour detection system as well as other baselines In contrast to existing work, our classifier does not need to observe tweets querying a piece of information to deem it a rumour, but instead we detect rumours from the tweet alone by exploiting context learnt during the event Our classifier achieves competitive performance, beating the state-of-the-art classifier that relies on querying tweets with improved precision and recall, as well as outperforming our best baseline with nearly 40% improvement in terms of F1 score The scale and diversity of our experiments reinforces the generalisability of our classifier

Learning Reporting Dynamics during Breaking News for Rumour Detection in Social Media.

In recent years, microblog systems such as Twitter and Sina Weibo have averaged multimillion active users. On the other hand, the microblog system has become a new means of rumor-spreading platform. In this paper, we investigate the machine-learning-based rumor identification approaches. We observed that feature design and selection has a stronger impact on the rumor identification accuracy than the selection of machine-learning algorithms. Meanwhile, the rumor publishers' behavior may diverge from normal users', and a rumor post may have different responses from a normal post. However, mass behavior on rumor posts has not been explored adequately. Hence, we investigate rumor identification schemes by applying five new features based on users' behaviors, and combine the new features with the existing well-proved effective user behavior-based features, such as followers' comments and reposting, to predict whether a microblog post is a rumor. Experiment results on real-world data from Sina Weibo demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of our proposed method and features. From the experiments, we conclude that the rumor detection based on mass behaviors is more effective than the detection based on microblogs' inherent features.

Liangyin Chen

Papers

Rumor Identification in Microblogging Systems Based on Users’ Behavior