Detecting Fake News on Social Media

Abstract

Limited labeled data is becoming the largest bottleneck for supervised learning systems. This is especially the case for many real-world tasks where large scale annotated examples are either too expensive to acquire or unavailable due to privacy or data access constraints. Weak supervision has shown to be a good means to mitigate the scarcity of annotated data by leveraging weak labels or injecting constraints from heuristic rules and/or external knowledge sources. Social media has little labeled data but possesses unique characteristics that make it suitable for generating weak supervision, resulting in a new type of weak supervision, i.e., weak social supervision. In this article, we illustrate how various aspects of social media can be used to generate weak social supervision. Specifically, we use the recent research on fake news detection as the use case, where social engagements are abundant but annotated examples are scarce, to show that weak social supervision is effective when facing the little labeled data problem. This article opens the door for learning with weak social supervision for other emerging tasks.

Trends in combating fake news on social media – a survey

“…People who have the same belief or are in the same political party will spread and share information that favours their political aspiration without proper verification. Cognitive theories (Kai & Huan, 2019) holds that human beings are generally not good at detecting what is real and what is authentic and posit that due to the gullible nature of human being, they are prone to fake news. Kai and Huan (2019) Contends that people usually tend to believe something that conforms to their view (confirmation bias) and will share it without verification because it is in accord with their thinking and will distort those that are not in accordance with their view even if there are factual.…”

“…The reason why consumers quickly believe in fake news has been highlighted by the cognitive psychologist (Kai & Huan, 2019) such as; by consensus, if others believe in it then the consumer will also believe in; consistency, if such information favours his/her belief pattern, popularity, how many places such information is found, fake news usually spread like wildfire and achieve high scalability especially with the use of social bots and hence will be all over social media within a twinkle of an eye. A psychological study by Roozenbeek and van der Linden (2019) has proven that attempt to correct fake news has often catalyzed the spread of fake news especially in cases of ideological differences i.e.…”

“…Fake news has caused enormous damage to our society and hence emerged as a potential threat not only to press freedom but to democracy as well (Gereme & Zhu, 2019;Granik & Mesyura, 2017;Kai & Huan, 2019;Zhou & Zafarani, 2018). There has not been any clear definition or acceptance of the concept of fake news (Granik & Mesyura, 2017;Kai & Huan, 2019;Zhou & Zafarani, 2018). Therefore, for us to accept what is considered to be fake news, one must first understand what news is, authentic or genuine news.…”

Between New Virus and News Virus (A Contradictive Situation in Covid-19 Pandemic)

“…Since the media can reach wider audiences [20], the media have the power to change audiences' viewpoints [25] [26] [20], either influencing positively by providing evidence-based information to the public [27] or negatively by presenting fake news (hoaxes) and acting against the government's programs [28] by spreading unreliable rumors [27]. Hoax news is perilous [29] and it causes significant negative social effects [30] because it is aimed to deceive and create misunderstanding among readers [31].…”

Internet – the First Source of (dis)Information

“…On the other hand, however, due to the same reasons, they enable dissemination of false information on a massive scale. 10 In June 2008, the American journalist Tim Russert died of a heart attack during the preparation of a program in the NBC's studio. In accordance with the standard procedure, all TV stations abstained from reporting his death until his family was informed of this tragic event.…”