relation: http://eprints.imtlucca.it/3688/
title: It’s Always April Fools’ Day! On the Difficulty of Social Network Misinformation Classification via Propagation Features
creator: Conti, Mauro
creator: Lain, Daniele
creator: Lazzeretti, Riccardo
creator: Lovisotto, Giulio
creator: Quattrociocchi, Walter
subject: H Social Sciences (General)
subject: HA Statistics
description: 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.
publisher: arXiv
date: 2017
type: Working Paper
type: NonPeerReviewed
format: application/pdf
language: en
rights: cc_by_nc
identifier: http://eprints.imtlucca.it/3688/1/1701.04221.pdf
identifier:   Conti, Mauro and Lain, Daniele and Lazzeretti, Riccardo and Lovisotto, Giulio and Quattrociocchi, Walter  It’s Always April Fools’ Day! On the Difficulty of Social Network Misinformation Classification via Propagation Features.  Working Paper   arXiv       (Submitted)   
relation: https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.04221
relation: arXiv:1701.04221