Uncovering Cross-Platform Spreading Patterns of Fake News about Covid-19

11 pages•Published: May 26, 2023

Lukas Schiesser, Hans Friedrich Witschel and Andre De La Harpe

Abstract

The spreading of fake news or misinformation on social media is a serious threat to modern societies, making more and more people susceptible to being unfairly influenced in their decision-making, be it in elections or other democratic processes. We contribute to the body of work in the area of fake news detection by studying cross-platform, multivariate spreading patterns of fake news on Covid-19-related topics – where existing studies have focused strongly on single platforms and/or on single metrics or indicators. Our findings show that there are several attributes that are specific to the cross-platform spreading process that become important predictors of fake news: there is e.g. a clear tendency that fake news travels faster from one platform to the other than real news. Meanwhile, although we have compiled a cross-platform corpus of fake and real news that future research may build on, data availability remains a challenge for future work.

Keyphrases: cross platform analysis, fake news detection, machine learning

In: Aurona Gerber and Knut Hinkelmann (editors). Proceedings of Society 5.0 Conference 2023, vol 93, pages 141-151.

Links:	https://easychair.org/publications/paper/V81H
	https://doi.org/10.29007/gkcs

BibTeX entry

@inproceedings{Society5.02023:Uncovering_Cross_Platform_Spreading,
  author    = {Lukas Schiesser and Hans Friedrich Witschel and Andre De La Harpe},
  title     = {Uncovering Cross-Platform Spreading Patterns of Fake News about Covid-19},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of Society 5.0 Conference 2023},
  editor    = {Aurona Gerber and Knut Hinkelmann},
  series    = {EPiC Series in Computing},
  volume    = {93},
  publisher = {EasyChair},
  bibsource = {EasyChair, https://easychair.org},
  issn      = {2398-7340},
  url       = {/publications/paper/V81H},
  doi       = {10.29007/gkcs},
  pages     = {141-151},
  year      = {2023}}

Download PDF Open PDF in browser