The Fake News Spreading Plague: Was it Preventable?
Eni Mustafaraj, Panagiotis Takis Metaxas

TL;DR
This paper analyzes how social networks are exploited to spread misinformation, illustrating the process with historical cases from 2010 and 2016, and discusses research impact on societal issues.
Contribution
It outlines the misinformation spreading recipe used in social networks and compares political and financial motivations in different scenarios.
Findings
Identification of infiltration as key to misinformation spread
Successful application of the recipe in 2010 and 2016 events
Discussion on increasing research impact on societal issues
Abstract
In 2010, a paper entitled "From Obscurity to Prominence in Minutes: Political Speech and Real-time search" won the Best Paper Prize of the Web Science 2010 Conference. Among its findings were the discovery and documentation of what was termed a "Twitter-bomb", an organized effort to spread misinformation about the democratic candidate Martha Coakley through anonymous Twitter accounts. In this paper, after summarizing the details of that event, we outline the recipe of how social networks are used to spread misinformation. One of the most important steps in such a recipe is the "infiltration" of a community of users who are already engaged in conversations about a topic, to use them as organic spreaders of misinformation in their extended subnetworks. Then, we take this misinformation spreading recipe and indicate how it was successfully used to spread fake news during the 2016 U.S.…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsMisinformation and Its Impacts · Spam and Phishing Detection · Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection
