Title
Detecting False Rumors from Retweet Dynamics on Social Media
Abstract
ABSTRACT False rumors are known to have detrimental effects on society. To prevent the spread of false rumors, social media platforms such as Twitter must detect them early. In this work, we develop a novel probabilistic mixture model that classifies true vs. false rumors based on the underlying spreading process. Specifically, our model is the first to formalize the self-exciting nature of true vs. false retweeting processes. This results in a novel mixture marked Hawkes model (MMHM). Owing to this, our model obviates the need for feature engineering; instead, it directly models the spreading process in order to make inferences of whether online rumors are incorrect. Our evaluation is based on 13,650 retweet cascades of both true. vs. false rumors from Twitter. Our model recognizes false rumors with a balanced accuracy of 64.97 % and an AUC of 69.46 %. It outperforms state-of-the-art baselines (both neural and feature engineering) by a considerable margin but while being fully interpretable. Our work has direct implications for practitioners: it leverages the spreading process as an implicit quality signal and, based on it, detects false content.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1145/3485447.3512000
International World Wide Web Conference
Keywords
DocType
Citations 
Spreading process, Hawkes process, Bayesian modeling, Mixture model, Fake news, Social media
Conference
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Christof Naumzik101.01
Stefan Feuerriegel2256.70