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Computer Science > Social and Information Networks

arXiv:1603.01511 (cs)
[Submitted on 4 Mar 2016]

Title:Hoaxy: A Platform for Tracking Online Misinformation

Authors:Chengcheng Shao, Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia, Alessandro Flammini, Filippo Menczer
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Abstract:Massive amounts of misinformation have been observed to spread in uncontrolled fashion across social media. Examples include rumors, hoaxes, fake news, and conspiracy theories. At the same time, several journalistic organizations devote significant efforts to high-quality fact checking of online claims. The resulting information cascades contain instances of both accurate and inaccurate information, unfold over multiple time scales, and often reach audiences of considerable size. All these factors pose challenges for the study of the social dynamics of online news sharing. Here we introduce Hoaxy, a platform for the collection, detection, and analysis of online misinformation and its related fact-checking efforts. We discuss the design of the platform and present a preliminary analysis of a sample of public tweets containing both fake news and fact checking. We find that, in the aggregate, the sharing of fact-checking content typically lags that of misinformation by 10--20 hours. Moreover, fake news are dominated by very active users, while fact checking is a more grass-roots activity. With the increasing risks connected to massive online misinformation, social news observatories have the potential to help researchers, journalists, and the general public understand the dynamics of real and fake news sharing.
Comments: 6 pages, 6 figures, submitted to Third Workshop on Social News On the Web
Subjects: Social and Information Networks (cs.SI); Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph)
Cite as: arXiv:1603.01511 [cs.SI]
  (or arXiv:1603.01511v1 [cs.SI] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1603.01511
Related DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2872518.2890098

Submission history

From: Chengcheng Shao [view email]
[v1] Fri, 4 Mar 2016 15:59:06 UTC (4,148 KB)
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Chengcheng Shao
Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia
Alessandro Flammini
Filippo Menczer
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