@techreport{eprints3688,
       publisher = {arXiv},
            type = {Working Paper},
     institution = {IMT Institute for Advanced Studies Lucca},
          author = {Mauro Conti and Daniele Lain and Riccardo Lazzeretti and Giulio Lovisotto and Walter Quattrociocchi},
          number = {arXiv:1701.04221},
           title = {It?s Always April Fools? Day! On the Difficulty of Social Network Misinformation Classification via Propagation Features},
            year = {2017},
        abstract = {Given the huge impact that Online Social Networks (OSN)
had in the way people get informed and form their opinion,
they became an attractive playground for malicious entities
that want to spread misinformation, and leverage their effect.
In fact, misinformation easily spreads on OSN and is a huge
threat for modern society, possibly influencing also the outcome
of elections, or even putting people?s life at risk (e.g.,
spreading ?anti-vaccines? misinformation). Therefore, it is
of paramount importance for our society to have some sort
of ?validation? on information spreading through OSN. The
need for a wide-scale validation would greatly benefit from
automatic tools.
In this paper, we show that it is difficult to carry out an automatic
classification of misinformation considering only structural
properties of content propagation cascades. We focus on
structural properties, because they would be inherently dif-
ficult to be manipulated, with the the aim of circumventing
classification systems. To support our claim, we carry out an
extensive evaluation on Facebook posts belonging to conspiracy
theories (as representative of misinformation), and scientific
news (representative of fact-checked content). Our
findings show that conspiracy content actually reverberates
in a way which is hard to distinguish from the one scientific
content does: for the classification mechanisms we investigated,
classification F1-score never exceeds 0.65 during content
propagation stages, and is still less than 0.7 even after
propagation is complete.},
             url = {http://eprints.imtlucca.it/3688/}
}