Early Detection of Social Media Hoaxes at Scale

Understand

The unmoderated nature of social media enables the diffusion of hoaxes, which in turn jeopardises the credibility of information gathered from social media platforms.

• Existing research on automated detection of hoaxes has the limitation of using relatively small datasets, owing to the difficulty of getting labelled data.
• This in turn has limited research exploring early detection of hoaxes as well as exploring other factors such as the effect of the size of the training data or the use of sliding windows.
• To mitigate this problem, we introduce a semi-automated method that leverages the Wikidata knowledge base to build large-scale datasets for veracity classification, focusing on celebrity death reports.