Over the past few years, we have been witnessing the rise of misinformation on the Web. People fall victims of fake news during their daily lives and assist their further propagation knowingly and inadvertently. There have been many initiatives that are trying to mitigate the damage caused by fake news, focusing on signals from either domain flag-lists, online social networks or artificial intelligence. In this work, we present Check-It, a system that combines, in an intelligent way, a variety of signals into a pipeline for fake news identification. Check-It is developed as a web browser plugin with the objective of efficient and timely fake news detection, respecting the user's privacy. Experimental results show that Check-It is able to outperform the state-of-the-art methods. On a dataset, consisting of 9 millions of articles labeled as fake and real, Check-It obtains classification accuracies that exceed 99%.

No abstract

In recent years, the increasing propagation of hate speech in online social networks and the need for effective counter-measures have drawn significant investment from social network companies and researchers. This has resulted in the development of many web platforms and mobile applications for reporting and monitoring online hate speech incidents. In this article, we present MANDOLA, a big-data processing system that monitors, detects, visualizes, and reports the spread and penetration of online hate-related speech using big-data approaches. MANDOLA consists of six individual components that intercommunicate to consume, process, store, and visualize statistical information regarding hate speech spread online. We also present a novel ensemble-based classification algorithm for hate speech detection that can significantly improve the performance of MANDOLA’s ability to detect hate speech. To present the functionality and usability of our system, we present a use case scenario of real-life event annotation and data correlation. As shown from the performance of the individual modules, as well as the usability and functionality of the whole system, MANDOLA is a powerful system for reporting and monitoring online hate speech.

No abstract

No abstract