scholarly journals Detecting Fake Users on Social Media with a Graph Database

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-56
Author(s):  
Yichun Zhao ◽  
Jens Weber

Social media has become a major part of people’s daily lives as it provides users with the convenience to connect with people, interact with friends, share personal content with others, and gather information. However, it also creates opportunities for fake users. Fake users on social media may be perceived as popular and influential if not detected. They might spread false information or fake news by making it look real, manipulating real users into making  certain decisions. In computer science, a social network can be treated as a graph, which is a data structure consisting of nodes being the social media users, and edges being the connections between users. Graph data can be stored in a graph database for efficient data analysis. In this paper, we propose using a graph database to achieve an increased scalability to accommodate larger graphs. Centrality measures as features were extracted for the random forest classifier to successfully detect fake users with high precision, recall, and accuracy. We have achieved promising results especially when compared with previous studies.   

Author(s):  
Erik P. Bucy ◽  
John E. Newhagen

The vulnerabilities shown by media systems and individual users exposed to attacks on truth from fake news and computational propaganda in recent years should be considered in light of the characteristics and concerns surrounding big data, especially the volume and velocity of messages delivered over social media platforms that tax the average user’s capacity to determine their truth value in real time. For reasons explained by the psychology of information processing, a high percentage of fake news that reaches audiences is accepted as true, particularly when distractions and interruptions typify user experiences with technology. As explained in this essay, fake news thrives in environments lacking editorial policing and epistemological vigilance, making the social media milieu ideally suited for spreading false information. In response, we suggest the value of an educational strategy to combat the dilemma that digital disinformation poses to informed citizenship.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (21) ◽  
pp. 202-209
Author(s):  
Hanis Wahed

Misinformation and disinformation are increasing as fast as the spreading of Coronavirus disease 2019 or Covid-19. Both happen as a result of the use of social media and technologies. The act of spreading fake news, rumors, and conspiracy theories or giving false information is considered an offence under the laws of Malaysia. However, the number of cases that relate to this offence has been increasing especially during the current pandemic. Thus, this article discusses the effects of the offence and the efforts taken in preventing it from happening. The focus is on the laws that are applicable in the situation. The methodology used is socio-legal research that involves analysing the laws that are applicable in the social situation. The article suggests that further research should be carried out on the applicable laws and amendments should be made to the relevant laws in order to combat the commission of the offence in the future. It is hoped that the suggestion will assist the authority to add more measures in combatting the pandemic and for the public to be more cautious of committing misinformation and disinformation.


Author(s):  
Cristina Pulido ◽  
Laura Ruiz-Eugenio ◽  
Gisela Redondo-Sama ◽  
Beatriz Villarejo-Carballido

One of the challenges today is to face fake news (false information) in health due to its potential impact on people’s lives. This article contributes to a new application of social impact in social media (SISM) methodology. This study focuses on the social impact of the research to identify what type of health information is false and what type of information is evidence of the social impact shared in social media. The analysis of social media includes Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter. This analysis contributes to identifying how interactions in these forms of social media depend on the type of information shared. The results indicate that messages focused on fake health information are mostly aggressive, those based on evidence of social impact are respectful and transformative, and finally, deliberation contexts promoted in social media overcome false information about health. These results contribute to advancing knowledge in overcoming fake health-related news shared in social media.


Expressing feeling or opinion is an inherent property of the individual and Now a day’s social media becomes an integral part of everyone’s life. It is a great medium to analyze the feeling of mass, but sometimes it flows the false feeling in the form of fake news or contents posted on social media. These fake content affects the people in the form of sentiments or companies in the business loss/profit, because most of the people make opinions based on what they read on social media. In fact, fake news or false information can create the damage among the individual, so it should be identified as early as possible. The interest in finding the pattern of fake news has been growing very rapidly in the last few years. In this article we proposed a comprehensive pattern analysis of viral contents, real or fake news on twitter using time series analysis. The proposed technique is simple but effective for detecting and analysis fake contents on the social networks. Experiments results shows that our proposed technique outperformed for differentiating real vs fake news on twitter. Finally, we identify and discuss future direction.


Author(s):  
Giandomenico Di Domenico ◽  
Annamaria Tuan ◽  
Marco Visentin

AbstractIn the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, unprecedent amounts of fake news and hoax spread on social media. In particular, conspiracy theories argued on the effect of specific new technologies like 5G and misinformation tarnished the reputation of brands like Huawei. Language plays a crucial role in understanding the motivational determinants of social media users in sharing misinformation, as people extract meaning from information based on their discursive resources and their skillset. In this paper, we analyze textual and non-textual cues from a panel of 4923 tweets containing the hashtags #5G and #Huawei during the first week of May 2020, when several countries were still adopting lockdown measures, to determine whether or not a tweet is retweeted and, if so, how much it is retweeted. Overall, through traditional logistic regression and machine learning, we found different effects of the textual and non-textual cues on the retweeting of a tweet and on its ability to accumulate retweets. In particular, the presence of misinformation plays an interesting role in spreading the tweet on the network. More importantly, the relative influence of the cues suggests that Twitter users actually read a tweet but not necessarily they understand or critically evaluate it before deciding to share it on the social media platform.


Symmetry ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 556
Author(s):  
Thaer Thaher ◽  
Mahmoud Saheb ◽  
Hamza Turabieh ◽  
Hamouda Chantar

Fake or false information on social media platforms is a significant challenge that leads to deliberately misleading users due to the inclusion of rumors, propaganda, or deceptive information about a person, organization, or service. Twitter is one of the most widely used social media platforms, especially in the Arab region, where the number of users is steadily increasing, accompanied by an increase in the rate of fake news. This drew the attention of researchers to provide a safe online environment free of misleading information. This paper aims to propose a smart classification model for the early detection of fake news in Arabic tweets utilizing Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, Machine Learning (ML) models, and Harris Hawks Optimizer (HHO) as a wrapper-based feature selection approach. Arabic Twitter corpus composed of 1862 previously annotated tweets was utilized by this research to assess the efficiency of the proposed model. The Bag of Words (BoW) model is utilized using different term-weighting schemes for feature extraction. Eight well-known learning algorithms are investigated with varying combinations of features, including user-profile, content-based, and words-features. Reported results showed that the Logistic Regression (LR) with Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) model scores the best rank. Moreover, feature selection based on the binary HHO algorithm plays a vital role in reducing dimensionality, thereby enhancing the learning model’s performance for fake news detection. Interestingly, the proposed BHHO-LR model can yield a better enhancement of 5% compared with previous works on the same dataset.


Information ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 248
Author(s):  
Simone Leonardi ◽  
Giuseppe Rizzo ◽  
Maurizio Morisio

In social media, users are spreading misinformation easily and without fact checking. In principle, they do not have a malicious intent, but their sharing leads to a socially dangerous diffusion mechanism. The motivations behind this behavior have been linked to a wide variety of social and personal outcomes, but these users are not easily identified. The existing solutions show how the analysis of linguistic signals in social media posts combined with the exploration of network topologies are effective in this field. These applications have some limitations such as focusing solely on the fake news shared and not understanding the typology of the user spreading them. In this paper, we propose a computational approach to extract features from the social media posts of these users to recognize who is a fake news spreader for a given topic. Thanks to the CoAID dataset, we start the analysis with 300 K users engaged on an online micro-blogging platform; then, we enriched the dataset by extending it to a collection of more than 1 M share actions and their associated posts on the platform. The proposed approach processes a batch of Twitter posts authored by users of the CoAID dataset and turns them into a high-dimensional matrix of features, which are then exploited by a deep neural network architecture based on transformers to perform user classification. We prove the effectiveness of our work by comparing the precision, recall, and f1 score of our model with different configurations and with a baseline classifier. We obtained an f1 score of 0.8076, obtaining an improvement from the state-of-the-art by 4%.


Mäetagused ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 79 ◽  
pp. 167-184
Author(s):  
Eda Kalmre ◽  

The article follows the narrative trend initiated by the social media posts and fake news during the first months of the corona quarantine, which claims that the decrease of contamination due to the quarantine has a positive effect on the environment and nature recovery. The author describes the context of the topic and follows the changes in the rhetoric through different genres, discussing the ways in which a picture can tell a truthful story. What is the relation between the context, truth, and rhetoric? This material spread globally, yet it was also readily “translated” into the Estonian context, and – what is very characteristic of the entire pandemic material – when approaching this material, truthful and fabricated texts, photos, and videos were combined. From the folkloristic point of view, these rumours in the form of fake news, first presented in the function of a tall tale and further following the sliding truth scale of legends, constitute a part of coping strategies, so-called crisis humour, yet, on the other hand, also a belief story presenting positive imagery, which surrounds the mainly apocalyptically perceived pandemic period and interprets the human existence on a wider scale. Even if these fake news and memes have no truth value, they communicate an idea – nature recovers – and definitely offer hope and a feeling of well-being.


Author(s):  
Fakhra Akhtar ◽  
Faizan Ahmed Khan

<p>In the digital age, fake news has become a well-known phenomenon. The spread of false evidence is often used to confuse mainstream media and political opponents, and can lead to social media wars, hatred arguments and debates.Fake news is blurring the distinction between real and false information, and is often spread on social media resulting in negative views and opinions. Earlier Research describe the fact that false propaganda is used to create false stories on mainstream media in order to cause a revolt and tension among the masses The digital rights foundation DRF report, which builds on the experiences of 152 journalists and activists in Pakistan, presents that more than 88 % of the participants find social media platforms as the worst source for information, with Facebook being the absolute worst. The dataset used in this paper relates to Real and fake news detection. The objective of this paper is to determine the Accuracy , precision , of the entire dataset .The results are visualized in the form of graphs and the analysis was done using python. The results showed the fact that the dataset holds 95% of the accuracy. The number of actual predicted cases were 296. Results of this paper reveals that The accuracy of the model dataset is 95.26 % the precision results 95.79 % whereas recall and F-Measure shows 94.56% and 95.17% accuracy respectively.Whereas in predicted models there are 296 positive attributes , 308 negative attributes 17 false positives and 13 false negatives. This research recommends that authenticity of news should be analysed first instead of drafting an opinion, sharing fake news or false information is considered unethical journalists and news consumers both should act responsibly while sharing any news.</p>


2018 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 350-361 ◽  
Author(s):  
Teri Finneman ◽  
Ryan J. Thomas

“Fake news” became a concern for journalists in 2017 as news organizations sought to differentiate themselves from false information spread via social media, websites and public officials. This essay examines the history of media hoaxing and fake news to help provide context for the current U.S. media environment. In addition, definitions of the concepts are proposed to provide clarity for researchers and journalists trying to explain these phenomena.


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