
Outline the course plan for fake news detection, covering knowledge-based, style-based, multi-modal, propagation-based, and credibility-based methods. Explore datasets, explainable detection, societal concerns, and research opportunities in deep learning for NLP.
Define fake news and related disinformation, and compare satire, propaganda, misinformation, hoaxes, and clickbait while outlining related areas such as authenticity, intention, rumor detection, true discovery, and bot-driven spread.
learn to manually identify fake news using simple heuristics, fact-checking, and the greatest test of currency, relevance, authority, accuracy, and purpose; verify sources, read beyond headlines, and think before sharing.
Explain why fake news detection matters for democracy, public trust, economy, and credibility, and show how post-truth and social networks shape public opinion.
Explore how First Draft Coalition, the Trust Project, and the International Fact-Checking Network combat disinformation, promote credibility indicators, and provide context in search and social platforms.
Explore knowledge-based, style-based, propagation-based, and credibility-based fake news detection, and compare manual expert with crowdsourced and automatic fact checking using knowledge graphs across creation, publication, and propagation.
Develop automated fact-checking with knowledge graphs by extracting and comparing facts from the open web, covering knowledge representation, fact extraction challenges, and link prediction for credibility assessment.
Learn stance detection by comparing headline and body text to determine if they agree, disagree, discuss, or are unrelated, aiding knowledge-based fake news detection.
Discover style based fake news detection by analyzing textual and image cues to gauge credibility early, without external knowledge bases, and compare it to knowledge-based approaches.
Explore multi-modal fake news detection by fusing text and image features with CNN-based and object-detection branches, achieving event-agnostic accuracy through adversarial and variational approaches.
Propagation based methods analyze cascades and propagation trees to distinguish fake from real news, using depth, breadth, size, lifetime, and heat, with early detection reaching ~90% accuracy in 12 hours.
Explore propagation based fake news detection using tree kernels and context sensitive measures blending user and content similarity with time decay, recursive neural networks and tree encoders for early detection.
Explore propagation based networks for fake news detection, including homogeneous, heterogeneous, and hierarchical graphs of posts, publishers, news, and users, with semi supervised learning and graph regularization to infer credibility.
Explore propagation-based fake news detection with a heterogeneous neural network. Learn how text representations, LDA cues, post features, and graph convolutional networks assess credibility across users, posts, and subjects.
Explore credibility based fake news detection by evaluating headlines, sources, and comments within a propagation network, using deep learning to combine article vectors with user graphs for fake news prediction.
Explore diverse fake news datasets and tools, including Liar and PolitiFact datasets, BuzzFeed News, Snopes API, fake news challenge, and social media sources from Twitter, Weibo, and Xinhua.
Explore explainable fake news detection by combining article content and user comments with hierarchical attention networks to reveal why a news item is fake.
Explore fake news generation with Grover, compare detectors, and highlight research opportunities in early detection, intention detection, cross-domain and multilingual detection, check-worthy content, and intervention strategies.
Explore four fake news detection approaches—knowledge-based, style-based, propagation-based, and credibility-based—and their use across creation, publication, and propagation stages in deep learning for NLP.
Fake news is now viewed as one of the greatest threats to democracy, journalism, and freedom of expression. The reach of fake news was best highlighted during the critical months of the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign. During that period, the top twenty frequently-discussed fake election stories generated 8.7M shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook, ironically, more than the 7.4M for the top twenty most-discussed election stories posted by 19 major news websites. Research has shown that compared to the truth, fake news on Twitter is typically retweeted by many more users and spreads far more rapidly, especially for political news. Our economies are not immune to the spread of fake news either, with fake news being connected to stock market fluctuations and large trades. For example, fake news claiming that Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States, was injured in an explosion wiped out $130 billion in stock value in 2017. These events and losses have motivated fake news research and sparked the discussion around fake news, as observed by skyrocketing usage of terms such as “post-truth” – selected as the international word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries in 2016.
The many perspectives on what fake news is, what characteristics and nature fake news or those who disseminate it share, and how fake news can be detected motivate the need for a comprehensive introduction and in-depth analysis, which this course aims to develop. This course is divided into three sections.
In the first section, I will introduce fake new detection, and discuss topics like "what is fake news and related areas", "how to manually identify fake news", "why detect fake news" and "efforts by various organisations towards fighting fake news". In the second section we will focus on various types of fake news detection methods. Specifically I will talk about four different fake news detection methods which are knowledge based fake news detection, style based fake news detection, propagation based fake news detection and credibility based fake news detection. Lastly in the third section I'll talk about other perspectives and topics related to fake news detection including fake news detection datasets, explainable fake news detection, concerns around fake news detection and research opportunities.
Hope you will enjoy this course and find the ideas useful for your work.