Page 344 - Invited Paper Session (IPS) - Volume 1

IPS162 Pedro C. et al.

Fake news and Big Data: An overview of
solutions
1
2
Nuno Guimaraes , Kimmo Vehkalahti , Pedro Campos 1,3
1 INESC TEC, University of Porto
2 University of Helsinki
3 Statistics Portugal

Abstract
Rapid online spread of misinformation like fake news has become one of the
top trends in modern societies. It has kept increasing, affecting elections and
other policy-making processes, skewing public opinion, and diminishing trust
in science. To tackle the problem, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other
companies are now using big data to identify websites that publish fake
information. By applying methods of data science, fake news can be detected
by scoring web pages, flagging sensationalistic words, weighing facts, and
checking website domain names and Alexa rankings to gauge their reputation.
Nevertheless, critical literacy is needed more than ever for reading and
understanding of news, especially in the context of Online Social Networks. In
this paper, we discuss how machine based actions and human based skills may
help in fighting against fake news.

Keywords
Critical Literacy; Online Social Networks; Social Data Science

1. Introduction
The era of Online Social Networks (OSN) has revolutionized the way
content is propagated on the web. Before the rise of Facebook and Twitter,
social networks already existed but none of them achieved the status that
these two OSN have achieved regarding the distribution and propagation of
personal and newsworthy content. Consequently, it has forced well-
established news media to adapt to a situation where information is diffused
at a fast pace and where users’ focus is limited to a few milliseconds per post.
In addition, with the decay on the sales of newspapers and tv viewership, social
media has provided the obvious path towards the survival of traditional news
media.
In order to monetize on OSNs, news media have relied on online
subscriptions and ad-revenue (generated through clicks and views of the
source website). However, the easiness of creating accounts on social media
and publishing content as well as the wider reach that these provide, has lead
some users to spread dubious content on the platforms with the purpose of

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