Fighting For Information Credibility: An End-to-end Framework To Identify Fake News During Natural Disasters

Abstract

Fast-spreading fake news has become an epidemic in the post-truth world of politics, the stock market, or even during natural disasters. A large amount of unverified information may reach a vast audience quickly via social media. The effect of misinformation (false) and disinformation (deliberately false) is more severe during the critical time of natural disasters such as flooding, hurricanes, or earthquakes. This can lead to disruptions in rescue missions and recovery activities, costing human lives and delaying the time needed for affected communities to return to normal. In this paper, we designed a comprehensive framework which is capable of developing a training set and trains a deep learning model for detecting fake news events occurring during disasters. Our proposed framework includes infrastructure to collect Twitter posts which spread false information. In our model implementation, we utilized the Transfer Learning scheme to transfer knowledge gained from a large and general fake news dataset to relatively smaller fake news events occurring during disasters as a means of overcoming the limited size of our training dataset. Our detection model was able to achieve an accuracy of 91.47% and F1 score of 90.89 when it was trained with the first 28 hours of Twitter data. Our vision for this study is to help emergency managers during disaster response with our framework so that they may perform their rescue and recovery actions effectively and efficiently without being distracted by false information.

Department(s)

Computer Science

Comments

National Science Foundation, Grant 1620451

Keywords and Phrases

Deep Learning; Fake News; Natural Disaster; Neural Networks; Social Network

International Standard Book Number (ISBN)

978-194937327-1

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

2411-3387

Document Type

Article - Conference proceedings

Document Version

Citation

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2024 The Authors, All rights reserved.

Publication Date

01 Jan 2020

This document is currently not available here.

Share

 
COinS