Detecting Rumors Through Modeling Information Propagation Networks in a Social Media Environment
10 Oct 2016-IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems (IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society)-Vol. 3, Iss: 2, pp 46-62
TL;DR: A new information propagation model based on a heterogeneous user representation and modeling approach is developed that is able to differentiate rumors from credible messages through observing distinctions in their respective propagation patterns in social media.
Abstract: In the midst of today’s pervasive influence of social media content and activities, information credibility has increasingly become a major issue. Accordingly, identifying false information, e.g., rumors circulated in social media environments, attracts expanding research attention and growing interests. Many previous studies have exploited user-independent features for rumor detection. These prior investigations uniformly treat all users relevant to the propagation of a social media message as instances of a generic entity. Such a modeling approach usually adopts a homogeneous network to represent all users, the practice of which ignores the variety across an entire user population in a social media environment. Recognizing this limitation in modeling methodologies, this paper explores user-specific features in a social media environment for rumor detection. The new approach hypothesizes whether a user tending to spread a rumor message is dependent on specific attributes of the user in addition to content characteristics of the message itself. Under this hypothesis, the information propagation patterns of rumors versus those of credible messages in a social media environment are differentiable. To explore and exploit this hypothesis, we develop a new information propagation model based on a heterogeneous user representation and modeling approach. By applying the new approach, we are able to differentiate rumors from credible messages through observing distinctions in their respective propagation patterns in social media. The experimental results show that the new information propagation model based on heterogeneous user representation can effectively distinguish rumors from credible social media content. Our experimental findings further show that rumors are more likely to spread among certain user groups.
Citations
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors introduce a framework for promptly identifying polarizing content on social media and thus predicting future fake news topics, based on a series of characteristics related to users' behavior on online social media.
Abstract: Users’ polarization and confirmation bias play a key role in misinformation spreading on online social media. Our aim is to use this information to determine in advance potential targets for hoaxes and fake news. In this article, we introduce a framework for promptly identifying polarizing content on social media and, thus, “predicting” future fake news topics. We validate the performances of the proposed methodology on a massive Italian Facebook dataset, showing that we are able to identify topics that are susceptible to misinformation with 77% accuracy. Moreover, such information may be embedded as a new feature in an additional classifier able to recognize fake news with 91% accuracy. The novelty of our approach consists in taking into account a series of characteristics related to users’ behavior on online social media such as Facebook, making a first, important step towards the mitigation of misinformation phenomena by supporting the identification of potential misinformation targets and thus the design of tailored counter-narratives.
185 citations
TL;DR: A state-of-the-art review of automated misinformation detection in social networks where deep learning (DL) is used to automatically process data and create patterns to make decisions not only to extract global features but also to achieve better results.
Abstract: Recently, the use of social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and Sina Weibo has become an inseparable part of our daily lives. It is considered as a convenient platform for users to share personal messages, pictures, and videos. However, while people enjoy social networks, many deceptive activities such as fake news or rumors can mislead users into believing misinformation. Besides, spreading the massive amount of misinformation in social networks has become a global risk. Therefore, misinformation detection (MID) in social networks has gained a great deal of attention and is considered an emerging area of research interest. We find that several studies related to MID have been studied to new research problems and techniques. While important, however, the automated detection of misinformation is difficult to accomplish as it requires the advanced model to understand how related or unrelated the reported information is when compared to real information. The existing studies have mainly focused on three broad categories of misinformation: false information, fake news, and rumor detection. Therefore, related to the previous issues, we present a comprehensive survey of automated misinformation detection on (i) false information, (ii) rumors, (iii) spam, (iv) fake news, and (v) disinformation. We provide a state-of-the-art review on MID where deep learning (DL) is used to automatically process data and create patterns to make decisions not only to extract global features but also to achieve better results. We further show that DL is an effective and scalable technique for the state-of-the-art MID. Finally, we suggest several open issues that currently limit real-world implementation and point to future directions along this dimension.
125 citations
Cites background from "Detecting Rumors Through Modeling I..."
...Additionally, existing approaches have some challenges for MID, e.g. data volume, data quality, domain complexity, interpretability, feature enrichment, model privacy, incorporating expert knowledge, temporal modeling, dynamic, etc. (Liu and Xu 2016; Ma et al....
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TL;DR: This study is original by presenting an important source of research by explaining the problems of online social network and the studies performed in this area and a reference work for researchers interested in analyzingOnline social network data and social network problems.
Abstract: The use of online social networks has made significant progress in recent years as the use of the Internet has become widespread worldwide as the technological infrastructure and the use of technological products evolve. It has become more suitable to reach online social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn via the internet and web 3.0 technologies. Thus, people have shared their views on many different topics and their emotions with other users more widely on these platforms. This means that a huge amount of data is created on platforms where millions of people connect with each other through social networks. Nevertheless, the development of computational paradigms at high speed and complexity with technological possibilities allows analysis of valuable data by means of social network analysis methods. Our goal for this paper is to present a review of novel and popular online social network analysis problems with related applications and a reference work for researchers interested in analyzing online social network data and social network problems. Unlike other individual studies we have gathered 21 online social network problems and defined them with related studies. Thus, this study is original by presenting an important source of research by explaining the problems of online social network and the studies performed in this area.
105 citations
TL;DR: The extraction and usage of various crowd intelligence in FID is investigated, which paves a promising way to tackle FID challenges, and the views on the open issues and future research directions are given.
Abstract: The massive spread of false information on social media has become a global risk, implicitly influencing public opinion and threatening social/political development. False information detection (FID) has thus become a surging research topic in recent years. As a promising and rapidly developing research field, we find that much effort has been paid to new research problems and approaches of FID. Therefore, it is necessary to give a comprehensive review of the new research trends of FID. We first give a brief review of the literature history of FID, based on which we present several new research challenges and techniques of it, including early detection, detection by multimodal data fusion, and explanatory detection. We further investigate the extraction and usage of various crowd intelligence in FID, which paves a promising way to tackle FID challenges. Finally, we give our views on the open issues and future research directions of FID, such as model adaptivity/generality to new events, embracing of novel machine learning models, aggregation of crowd wisdom, adversarial attack and defense in detection models, and so on.
80 citations
Cites background from "Detecting Rumors Through Modeling I..."
...[102] construct the information dissemination networks based on heterogeneous users’ specific attributes for identifying special dissemination structures of false information....
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TL;DR: Zhang et al. as discussed by the authors proposed a novel deep neural network to detect fake news early using a status-sensitive crowd response feature extractor that extracts both text features and user features from combinations of users' text response and their corresponding user profiles, and a position-aware attention mechanism that highlights important user responses at specific ranking positions.
Abstract: The fast spreading of fake news stories on social media can cause inestimable social harm. Developing effective methods to detect them early is of paramount importance. A major challenge of fake news early detection is fully utilizing the limited data observed at the early stage of news propagation and then learning useful patterns from it for identifying fake news. In this article, we propose a novel deep neural network to detect fake news early. It has three novel components: (1) a status-sensitive crowd response feature extractor that extracts both text features and user features from combinations of users’ text response and their corresponding user profiles, (2) a position-aware attention mechanism that highlights important user responses at specific ranking positions, and (3) a multi-region mean-pooling mechanism to perform feature aggregation based on multiple window sizes. Experimental results on two real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed model can detect fake news with greater than 90% accuracy within 5 minutes after it starts to spread and before it is retweeted 50 times, which is significantly faster than state-of-the-art baselines. Most importantly, our approach requires only 10% labeled fake news samples to achieve this effectiveness under PU-Learning settings.
76 citations
References
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TL;DR: Issues such as solving SVM optimization problems theoretical convergence multiclass classification probability estimates and parameter selection are discussed in detail.
Abstract: LIBSVM is a library for Support Vector Machines (SVMs). We have been actively developing this package since the year 2000. The goal is to help users to easily apply SVM to their applications. LIBSVM has gained wide popularity in machine learning and many other areas. In this article, we present all implementation details of LIBSVM. Issues such as solving SVM optimization problems theoretical convergence multiclass classification probability estimates and parameter selection are discussed in detail.
40,826 citations
Posted Content•
TL;DR: It is argued that localized conformity of behavior and the fragility of mass behaviors can be explained by informational cascades.
Abstract: An informational cascade occurs when it is optimal for an individual, having observed the actions of those ahead of him, to follow the behavior of the preceding individual without regard to his own information. We argue that localized conformity of behavior and the fragility of mass behaviors can be explained by informational cascades.
5,412 citations
"Detecting Rumors Through Modeling I..." refers methods in this paper
...In this paper, we design our information propagation model for differentiating rumors from truthful messages propagated over a social network by extending the IC model because the scenario of microblog propagation in a social network satisfies all the following three key constraints assumed by the IC model [28]....
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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that localized conformity of behavior and the fragility of mass behaviors can be explained by informational cascades, where an individual, having observed the actions of those ahead of him, to follow the behavior of the preceding individual without regard to his own information.
Abstract: An informational cascade occurs when it is optimal for an individual, having observed the actions of those ahead of him, to follow the behavior of the preceding individual without regard to his own information. We argue that localized conformity of behavior and the fragility of mass behaviors can be explained by informational cascades.
4,731 citations
TL;DR: It is shown that heterogeneity plays an ambiguous role in determining a system's stability: increasingly heterogeneous thresholds make the system more vulnerable to global cascades; but anincreasingly heterogeneous degree distribution makes it less vulnerable.
Abstract: The origin of large but rare cascades that are triggered by small initial shocks is a phenomenon that manifests itself as diversely as cultural fads, collective action, the diffusion of norms and innovations, and cascading failures in infrastructure and organizational networks. This paper presents a possible explanation of this phenomenon in terms of a sparse, random network of interacting agents whose decisions are determined by the actions of their neighbors according to a simple threshold rule. Two regimes are identified in which the network is susceptible to very large cascades—herein called global cascades—that occur very rarely. When cascade propagation is limited by the connectivity of the network, a power law distribution of cascade sizes is observed, analogous to the cluster size distribution in standard percolation theory and avalanches in self-organized criticality. But when the network is highly connected, cascade propagation is limited instead by the local stability of the nodes themselves, and the size distribution of cascades is bimodal, implying a more extreme kind of instability that is correspondingly harder to anticipate. In the first regime, where the distribution of network neighbors is highly skewed, it is found that the most connected nodes are far more likely than average nodes to trigger cascades, but not in the second regime. Finally, it is shown that heterogeneity plays an ambiguous role in determining a system's stability: increasingly heterogeneous thresholds make the system more vulnerable to global cascades; but an increasingly heterogeneous degree distribution makes it less vulnerable.
2,450 citations
"Detecting Rumors Through Modeling I..." refers methods in this paper
...Popular probabilistic models established for modeling such an information propagation process include the independent cascade (IC) model [22], [23], the linear threshold model [24], [25], and the voter model [26], [27]....
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28 Mar 2011
TL;DR: There are measurable differences in the way messages propagate, that can be used to classify them automatically as credible or not credible, with precision and recall in the range of 70% to 80%.
Abstract: We analyze the information credibility of news propagated through Twitter, a popular microblogging service. Previous research has shown that most of the messages posted on Twitter are truthful, but the service is also used to spread misinformation and false rumors, often unintentionally.On this paper we focus on automatic methods for assessing the credibility of a given set of tweets. Specifically, we analyze microblog postings related to "trending" topics, and classify them as credible or not credible, based on features extracted from them. We use features from users' posting and re-posting ("re-tweeting") behavior, from the text of the posts, and from citations to external sources.We evaluate our methods using a significant number of human assessments about the credibility of items on a recent sample of Twitter postings. Our results shows that there are measurable differences in the way messages propagate, that can be used to classify them automatically as credible or not credible, with precision and recall in the range of 70% to 80%.
2,123 citations
"Detecting Rumors Through Modeling I..." refers background in this paper
...COMPARING THE PERFORMANCE OF THE PROPOSED METHOD WITH THAT OF SVM CLASSIFIERS USING DIFFERENT SETS OF FEATURES [7], INCLUDING 1) MESSAGE-BASED, 2) USER-BASED, 3) PROPAGATION-BASED, AND 4) COMBINED, AS WELL AS TWO PEER METHODS—5) YANG’S [3] AND 6) SUN’S [12], 7) THE REDUCED VERSION AND 8) THE FULL VERSION OF THE PROPOSED METHOD....
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...[7] in their Twitter information credibility study summarize three categories of features used to identify rumors, which are message-based, user-based, and propagation-based features....
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...[7] in their comprehensive study summarized the following three main...
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