Detecting Users Prone to Spread Fake News on Arabic Twitter

Zien Sheikh Ali, Abdulaziz Al-Ali, Tamer Elsayed


Abstract
The spread of misinformation has become a major concern to our society, and social media is one of its main culprits. Evidently, health misinformation related to vaccinations has slowed down global efforts to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. Studies have shown that fake news spreads substantially faster than real news on social media networks. One way to limit this fast dissemination is by assessing information sources in a semi-automatic way. To this end, we aim to identify users who are prone to spread fake news in Arabic Twitter. Such users play an important role in spreading misinformation and identifying them has the potential to control the spread. We construct an Arabic dataset on Twitter users, which consists of 1,546 users, of which 541 are prone to spread fake news (based on our definition). We use features extracted from users’ recent tweets, e.g., linguistic, statistical, and profile features, to predict whether they are prone to spread fake news or not. To tackle the classification task, multiple learning models are employed and evaluated. Empirical results reveal promising detection performance, where an F1 score of 0.73 was achieved by the logistic regression model. Moreover, when tested on a benchmark English dataset, our approach has outperformed the current state-of-the-art for this task.
Anthology ID:
2022.osact-1.2
Volume:
Proceedinsg of the 5th Workshop on Open-Source Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools with Shared Tasks on Qur'an QA and Fine-Grained Hate Speech Detection
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Hend Al-Khalifa, Tamer Elsayed, Hamdy Mubarak, Abdulmohsen Al-Thubaity, Walid Magdy, Kareem Darwish
Venue:
OSACT
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
12–22
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.osact-1.2
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zien Sheikh Ali, Abdulaziz Al-Ali, and Tamer Elsayed. 2022. Detecting Users Prone to Spread Fake News on Arabic Twitter. In Proceedinsg of the 5th Workshop on Open-Source Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools with Shared Tasks on Qur'an QA and Fine-Grained Hate Speech Detection, pages 12–22, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Detecting Users Prone to Spread Fake News on Arabic Twitter (Sheikh Ali et al., OSACT 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.osact-1.2.pdf
Code
 bigirqu/arpfn