Detecting and Mitigating Rumors in Social Media

The penetration of social media today enables the rapid spread of breaking news and other developments to millions of people across the globe within hours. However, such pervasive use of social media by the general masses to receive and consume news is not without its attendant negative consequences as it also opens opportunities for nefarious elements to spread rumors or misinformation. A rumor generally refers to an interesting piece of information that is widely disseminated through a social network and whose credibility cannot be easily substantiated. A rumor can later turn out to be true or false or remain unverified. The spread of misinformation and fake news can lead to deleterious effects on users and society. The objective of the proposed research is to develop a range of machine learning methods that will effectively detect and characterize rumor veracity in social media. Since users are the primary protagonists on social media, analyzing the characteristics of information spread w.r.t. users can be effective for our purpose. For our first problem, we propose a method of computing user embeddings from underlying social networks. For our second problem, we propose a long short-term memory (LSTM) based model that can classify whether a story discussed in a thread can be categorized as a false, true, or unverified rumor. We demonstrate the utility of user features computed from the first problem to address the second problem. For our third problem, we propose a method that uses user profile information to detect rumor veracity. This method has the advantage of not requiring the underlying social network, which can be tedious to compute. For the last problem, we investigate a rumor mitigation technique that recommends fact-checking URLs to rumor debunkers, i.e., social network users who are very passionate about disseminating true news. Here, we incorporate the influence of other users on rumor debunkers in addition to their previous URL sharing history to recommend relevant fact-checking URLs.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy

Level thesis:degree_level

doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Science and Applications

Department dc:contributor.department

Computer Science

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Islam, Mohammad Raihanul

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Ramakrishnan, Naren

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Lu, Chang-Tien
• Liu, Huan
• Reddy, Chandan K.
• Prakash, B. Aditya

• Rumor Veracity Detection
• Rumor Mitigation
• Social Network Analysis
• Deep learning (Machine learning)

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Dc Identifier Other

vt_gsexam:26529

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/99057