Detecting Fake News on Social Media

Book excerpt: This book is an accessible introduction to the study of detecting fake news on social media. The concepts, algorithms, and methods described in this book can help harness the power of social media to build effective and intelligent fake news detection systems. In the past decade, social media is becoming increasingly popular for news consumption due to its easy access, fast dissemination, and low cost. However, social media also enables the wide propagation of "fake news," i.e., news with intentionally false information. Fake news on social media can have significant negative societal effects. Therefore, fake news detection on social media has recently become an emerging research that is attracting tremendous attention. From a data mining perspective, this book introduces the basic concepts and characteristics of fake news across disciplines, reviews representative fake news detection methods in a principled way, and illustrates advanced settings of fake news detection on social media. In particular, the authors discuss the value of news content and social context, as well as important extensions to handle early detection, weakly-supervised detection, and explainable detection. This is essential reading for students, researchers, and practitioners to understand, manage, and excel in this area. This book is supported by additional materials, including lecture slides, the complete set of figures, key references, datasets, tools used in this book, and the source code of representative algorithms.