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IPS162 Pedro C. et al.
profiting through ad-advertising method or changing other users’
perceptions.
In 2014, World Economic Forum identified the rapid spread of
misinformation online as one of the top 10 trends in modern societies (World
Economic Forum, 2014). The continuous increase of dubious information in
OSN is indeed concerning as it affects real-world events like elections (Allcott
& Gentzkow, 2017) and other policy-making processes. With approximately
67% of the Americans consuming news through social media (Gottfried &
Shearer, 2017) and other similar results all over the globe (Reuters Institute,
2017) it becomes crucial to develop mechanisms that are capable of detecting
this type of dubious information online.
This paper is structured as follows: We start in Section 2 by describing
various types of dubious information, namely false information, biased news,
and misleading statistics. In Section 3, we present possible solutions for the
problems, ending up with Discussion and Conclusions in Section 4.

2. Dubious information
In this section, we describe three types of dubious information: a) false
information, b) biased news, and c) misleading statistics.
a. False information
A common Online Social Network (OSN) user should learn to be critical
regarding his/her personal feed, as there are many types of false information
online and several techniques that are used to deceive users into believing
such false information.
One of the most common techniques is URL mimic where false information
websites have a similar address to real ones. A wellknown example is
bloomberg.ma website which was responsible for publishing a news piece
about an offer for the takeover of Twitter, resulting in an increase in the shares
of the companies (de la Merced & Goldstein, 2018). So, users must be aware
of the origin of the content. In order to tackle this problem, Facebook has
implemented a new feature where it provides a context to external URLs
shared in posts (Facebook, 2017). Similar tools in other social media are yet
inexistent.
A more recent method to spread misinformation uses the hacking of a
verified account to reach a high potential number of followers. The
“Doubleswitch” method targets particular high reputation social media
accounts (e.g., journalists, politicians, human rights activists) to spread dubious
information and makes recovering the access to those accounts non-trivial
(Security, 2017). Therefore, even when the sources of posts are trustworthy, its
content should not be taken as facts.
Another problem that highlights the importance of journalists and
publications in the spread of false information is the “false confirmation” or

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