Skip to main content

FacTweet: Profiling Fake News Twitter Accounts

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Statistical Language and Speech Processing (SLSP 2020)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 12379))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

We present an approach to detect fake news in Twitter at the account level using a neural recurrent model and a variety of different semantic and stylistic features. Our method extracts a set of features from the timelines of news Twitter accounts by reading their posts as chunks, rather than dealing with each tweet independently. We show the experimental benefits of modeling latent stylistic signatures of mixed fake and real news with a sequential model over a wide range of strong baselines.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. 1.

    Later on, the authors created an online API for the system called Botometer in: https://botometer.iuni.iu.edu.

  2. 2.

    https://sentic.net/.

  3. 3.

    NRC has also two sentiment categories, positive and negative.

  4. 4.

    We considered 2 or more consecutive characters, and 3 or more consecutive letters.

  5. 5.

    https://nlp.stanford.edu/projects/glove/.

  6. 6.

    Experimentally, we found that the GloVe model achieves better results than Google News word2vec or fastText models.

  7. 7.

    Many of the accounts were deactivated during the collecting process, consequently only 144 accounts were used.

  8. 8.

    http://www.propornot.com/p/the-list.html.

  9. 9.

    https://tinyurl.com/yctvve9h.

  10. 10.

    https://github.com/hyperopt.

References

  1. Aker, A., Kevin, V., Bontcheva, K.: Credibility and transparency of news sources: data collection and feature analysis. arXiv (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Aker, A., Kevin, V., Bontcheva, K.: Predicting news source credibility. arXiv (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Badawy, A., Lerman, K., Ferrara, E.: Who falls for online political manipulation? In: Companion Proceedings of the 2019 World Wide Web Conference, pp. 162–168. ACM (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Baly, R., Karadzhov, G., Alexandrov, D., Glass, J., Nakov, P.: Predicting factuality of reporting and bias of news media sources. In: Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pp. 3528–3539 (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Baly, R., Karadzhov, G., Saleh, A., Glass, J., Nakov, P.: Multi-task ordinal regression for jointly predicting the trustworthiness and the leading political ideology of news media. In: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pp. 2109–2116 (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Boyd, R.L., et al.: Characterizing the Internet Research Agency’s Social Media Operations During the 2016 US Presidential Election using Linguistic Analyses. PsyArXiv (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Choi, Y., Wiebe, J.: +/-EffectWordNet: sense-level lexicon acquisition for opinion inference. In: Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pp. 1181–1191 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Clark, E.M., Williams, J.R., Jones, C.A., Galbraith, R.A., Danforth, C.M., Dodds, P.S.: Sifting robotic from organic text: a natural language approach for detecting automation on Twitter. J. Comput. Sci. 16, 1–7 (2016)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Davis, C.A., Varol, O., Ferrara, E., Flammini, A., Menczer, F.: BotOrNot: a system to evaluate social bots. In: Proceedings of the 25th International Conference Companion on World Wide Web, pp. 273–274. International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Dhingra, B., Zhou, Z., Fitzpatrick, D., Muehl, M., Cohen, W.W.: Tweet2Vec: character-based distributed representations for social media. In: The 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), p. 269 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Dickerson, J.P., Kagan, V., Subrahmanian, V.: Using sentiment to detect bots on Twitter: are humans more opinionated than bots? In: 2014 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2014), pp. 620–627. IEEE (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Ghanem, B., Buscaldi, D., Rosso, P.: TexTrolls: identifying Russian trolls on Twitter from a textual perspective. arXiv preprint arXiv:1910.01340 (2019)

  13. Ghanem, B., Cignarella, A.T., Bosco, C., Rosso, P., Rangel, F.: UPV-28-UNITO at SemEval-2019 Task 7: exploiting post’s nesting and syntax information for rumor stance classification. In: Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval), pp. 1125–1131 (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Ghanem, B., Glavas, G., Giachanou, A., Ponzetto, S.P., Rosso, P., Pardo, F.M.R.: UPV-UMA at CheckThat! Lab: verifying Arabic claims using a cross lingual approach. In: Working Notes of CLEF 2019 - Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum, Lugano, Switzerland, 9–12 September 2019 (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Ghanem, B., Rosso, P., Rangel, F.: An emotional analysis of false information in social media and news articles. ACM Trans. Internet Technol. (TOIT) 20(2), 1–18 (2020)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Giachanou, A., Rosso, P., Crestani, F.: Leveraging emotional signals for credibility detection. In: Proceedings of the 42nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, pp. 877–880 (2019)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Graham, J., Haidt, J., Nosek, B.A.: Liberals and conservatives rely on different sets of moral foundations. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 96(5), 1029 (2009)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Im, J., et al.: Still out there: modeling and identifying Russian troll accounts on Twitter. arXiv preprint arXiv:1901.11162 (2019)

  19. Karduni, A., et al.: Can you verifi this? Studying uncertainty and decision-making about misinformation using visual analytics. In: Twelfth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Mohammad, S.M., Turney, P.D.: Emotions evoked by common words and phrases: using mechanical turk to create an emotion lexicon. In: Proceedings of the NAACL HLT 2010 Workshop on Computational Approaches to Analysis and Generation of Emotion in Text, pp. 26–34 (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Shao, C., Ciampaglia, G.L., Varol, O., Flammini, A., Menczer, F.: The spread of fake news by social bots. arXiv preprint arXiv:1707.07592, pp. 96–104 (2017)

  22. Volkova, S., Shaffer, K., Jang, J.Y., Hodas, N.: Separating facts from fiction: linguistic models to classify suspicious and trusted news posts on Twitter. In: Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) (Volume 2: Short Papers), vol. 2, pp. 647–653 (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Vosoughi, S., Roy, D., Aral, S.: The spread of true and false news online. Science 359(6380), 1146–1151 (2018)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  24. Wilson, T., Wiebe, J., Hoffmann, P.: Recognizing contextual polarity in phrase-level sentiment analysis. In: Proceedings of Human Language Technology Conference and Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) (2005)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgment

The work of Paolo Rosso was partially funded by the Spanish MICINN under the research project MISMIS-FAKEnHATE on Misinformation and Miscommunication in social media: FAKE news and HATE speech (PGC2018-096212-B-C31).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Bilal Ghanem .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Ghanem, B., Ponzetto, S.P., Rosso, P. (2020). FacTweet: Profiling Fake News Twitter Accounts. In: Espinosa-Anke, L., Martín-Vide, C., Spasić, I. (eds) Statistical Language and Speech Processing. SLSP 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12379. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59430-5_3

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59430-5_3

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-59429-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-59430-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics