ABSTRACT
Massive amounts of misinformation have been observed to spread in uncontrolled fashion across social media. Examples include rumors, hoaxes, fake news, and conspiracy theories. At the same time, several journalistic organizations devote significant efforts to high-quality fact checking of online claims. The resulting information cascades contain instances of both accurate and inaccurate information, unfold over multiple time scales, and often reach audiences of considerable size. All these factors pose challenges for the study of the social dynamics of online news sharing. Here we introduce Hoaxy, a platform for the collection, detection, and analysis of online misinformation and its related fact-checking efforts. We discuss the design of the platform and present a preliminary analysis of a sample of public tweets containing both fake news and fact checking. We find that, in the aggregate, the sharing of fact-checking content typically lags that of misinformation by 10-20 hours. Moreover, fake news are dominated by very active users, while fact checking is a more grass-roots activity. With the increasing risks connected to massive online misinformation, social news observatories have the potential to help researchers, journalists, and the general public understand the dynamics of real and fake news sharing.
- A. Anagnostopoulos, A. Bessi, G. Caldarelli, M. Del Vicario, F. Petroni, A. Scala, F. Zollo, and W. Quattrociocchi. Viral misinformation: the role of homophily and polarization. arXiv preprint arXiv:1411.2893, 2014. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- M. Anderson and A. Caumont. How social media is reshaping news. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/09/24/how-social-media-is-reshaping-news/, 2014. {Online; accessed December 2015}.Google Scholar
- E. Bakshy, S. Messing, and L. A. Adamic. Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on facebook. Science, 348(6239):1130--1132, 2015.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- Y. Benkler. The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom. Yale University Press, 2006. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- T. Berners-Lee, W. Hall, J. Hendler, N. Shadbolt, and D. J. Weitzner. Creating a science of the web. Science, 313(5788):769--771, 2006.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- C. Boididou, S. Papadopoulos, Y. Kompatsiaris, S. Schifferes, and N. Newman. Challenges of computational verification in social multimedia. In Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on World Wide Web, WWW '14 Companion, pages 743--748, 2014. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- A. M. Buttenheim, K. Sethuraman, S. B. Omer, A. L. Hanlon, M. Z. Levy, and D. Salmon.MMR\ vaccination status of children exempted from school-entry immunization mandates. Vaccine, 33(46):6250 -- 6256, 2015.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- C. Carvalho, N. Klagge, and E. Moench. The persistent effects of a false news shock. Journal of Empirical Finance, 18(4):597 -- 615, 2011.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- C. Castillo, M. Mendoza, and B. Poblete. Information credibility on Twitter. In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on World Wide Web, page 675, 2011. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- G. L. Ciampaglia, A. Flammini, and F. Menczer. The production of information in the attention economy. Scientific Reports, 5:9452, 2015.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- G. L. Ciampaglia, P. Shiralkar, L. M. Rocha, J. Bollen, F. Menczer, and A. Flammini. Computational fact checking from knowledge networks. PLoS ONE, 10(6):e0128193, 06 2015.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- M. Conover, J. Ratkiewicz, M. Francisco, B. Gonçalves, A. Flammini, and F. Menczer. Political polarization on Twitter. In Proc. 5th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM), 2011.Google Scholar
- M. Del Vicario, A. Bessi, F. Zollo, F. Petroni, A. Scala, G. Caldarelli, H. E. Stanley, and W. Quattrociocchi. The spreading of misinformation online. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(3):554--559, 2016.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- Z. Dezsö, E. Almaas, A. Lukács, B. Rácz, I. Szakadát, and A.-L. Barabási. Dynamics of information access on the web. Phys. Rev. E, 73:066132, Jun 2006.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- N. Diakopoulos, M. De Choudhury, and M. Naaman. Finding and assessing social media information sources in the context of journalism. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI '12, pages 2451--2460, 2012. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Facebook Newsroom. Company info. https://web.archive.org/web/20151222043012/http://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/. Online; accessed December 2015.Google Scholar
- E. Ferrara, O. Varol, C. Davis, F. Menczer, and A. Flammini. The rise of social bots. Comm. ACM, Forthcoming. preprint arXiv:1407.5225.Google Scholar
- A. Friggeri, L. A. Adamic, D. Eckles, and J. Cheng. Rumor cascades. In Proc. Eighth Intl. AAAI Conf. on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM), 2014.Google Scholar
- S. Galam. Modelling rumors: the no plane pentagon french hoax case. Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and Its Applications, 320:571--580, 2003.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- N. Hassan, A. Sultana, Y. Wu, G. Zhang, C. Li, J. Yang, and C. Yu. Data in, fact out: Automated monitoring of facts by factwatcher. Proc. VLDB Endow., 7(13):1557--1560, Aug. 2014. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- A. M. Kaplan and M. Haenlein. Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media. Business Horizons, 53(1):59 -- 68, 2010.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- A. Kata. Anti-vaccine activists, web 2.0, and the postmodern paradigm--an overview of tactics and tropes used online by the anti-vaccination movement. Vaccine, 30(25):3778--3789, 2012.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- T. Lauricella, C. S. Stewart, and S. Ovide. Twitter hoax sparks swift stock swoon. The Wall Street Journal, 23, 2013.Google Scholar
- J. Lehmann, C. Castillo, M. Lalmas, and E. Zuckerman. Finding news curators in twitter. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on World Wide Web, WWW '13 Companion, pages 863--870, 2013. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- M. McPherson, L. Smith-Lovin, and J. M. Cook. Birds of a feather: Homophily in social networks. Annual Review of Sociology, 27(1):415--444, 2001.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- P. T. Metaxas, S. Finn, and E. Mustafaraj. Using twittertrails.com to investigate rumor propagation. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference Companion on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing, CSCW'15 Companion, pages 69--72, 2015. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- D. Mocanu, L. Rossi, Q. Zhang, M. Karsai, and W. Quattrociocchi. Collective attention in the age of (mis)information. Computers in Human Behavior, 51, Part B:1198--1204, 2015. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- D. Nikolov, D. Fregolente, A. Flammini, and F. Menczer. Measuring online social bubbles. PeerJ Computer Science, 1:e38, 2015.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- B. Nyhan, J. Reifler, and P. A. Ubel. The hazards of correcting myths about health care reform. Medical Care, 51(2):127--132, 2013.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- A. Perrin. Social media usage: 2005--2015. http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/10/08/2015/Social-Networking-Usage-2005--2015/.Google Scholar
- J. Ratkiewicz, M. Conover, M. Meiss, B. Gonçalves, A. Flammini, and F. Menczer. Detecting and tracking political abuse in social media. In Proc. 5th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM), 2011.Google Scholar
- J. Ratkiewicz, M. Conover, M. Meiss, B. Gonçalves, S. Patil, A. Flammini, and F. Menczer. Truthy: Mapping the spread of astroturf in microblog streams. In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference Companion on World Wide Web, WWW '11, pages 249--252, 2011. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- P. Resnick, S. Carton, S. Park, Y. Shen, and N. Zeffer. Rumorlens: A system for analyzing the impact of rumors and corrections in social media. In Proc. Computational Journalism Conference, 2014.Google Scholar
- V. Subrahmanian, A. Azaria, S. Durst, V. Kagan, A. Galstyan, K. Lerman, L. Zhu, E. Ferrara, A. Flammini, F. Menczer, et al. The DARPA Twitter Bot Challenge. arXiv preprint arXiv:1601.05140, 2016.Google Scholar
- D. Tapscott and A. D. Williams. Wikinomics: How mass collaboration changes everything. Penguin, 2008. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- E. Wemple. Hurricane Sandy: NYSE NOT flooded! http://wapo.st/1QiG16A, October 2012. Last accessed 2016-02-04.Google Scholar
- L. Weng, A. Flammini, A. Vespignani, and F. Menczer. Competition among memes in a world with limited attention. Scientific Reports, 2, 2012.Google Scholar
Index Terms
- Hoaxy: A Platform for Tracking Online Misinformation
Recommendations
The Rise of Guardians: Fact-checking URL Recommendation to Combat Fake News
SIGIR '18: The 41st International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research & Development in Information RetrievalA large body of research work and efforts have been focused on detecting fake news and building online fact-check systems in order to debunk fake news as soon as possible. Despite the existence of these systems, fake news is still wildly shared by ...
Rumor Gauge: Predicting the Veracity of Rumors on Twitter
Special Issue on KDD 2016 and Regular PapersThe spread of malicious or accidental misinformation in social media, especially in time-sensitive situations, such as real-world emergencies, can have harmful effects on individuals and society. In this work, we developed models for automated ...
The Spread of Misinformation in Social Media
WWW '16 Companion: Proceedings of the 25th International Conference Companion on World Wide WebAs social media become major channels for the diffusion of news and information, they are also increasingly attractive and targeted for abuse and manipulation. This talk overviews ongoing network analytics, data mining, and modeling efforts to ...





Comments