The Rise of Guardians: Fact-checking URL Recommendation to Combat Fake News

TL;DR

This paper studies online guardians who correct misinformation using fact-check URLs and proposes a recommendation model to enhance their engagement, significantly improving fact-checking activity and dissemination of verified information.

Contribution

It introduces a novel URL recommendation model to motivate guardians to participate more in fact-checking and spreading verified news.

Findings

Guardians respond within one day to claims.

They spread verified information to hundreds of millions.

The proposed model outperforms existing models by 11-33%.

Abstract

A large body of research work and efforts have been focused on detecting fake news and building online fact-check systems in order to debunk fake news as soon as possible. Despite the existence of these systems, fake news is still wildly shared by online users. It indicates that these systems may not be fully utilized. After detecting fake news, what is the next step to stop people from sharing it? How can we improve the utilization of these fact-check systems? To fill this gap, in this paper, we (i) collect and analyze online users called guardians, who correct misinformation and fake news in online discussions by referring fact-checking URLs; and (ii) propose a novel fact-checking URL recommendation model to encourage the guardians to engage more in fact-checking activities. We found that the guardians usually took less than one day to reply to claims in online conversations and took another day to spread verified information to hundreds of millions of followers. Our proposed recommendation model outperformed four state-of-the-art models by 11%~33%. Our source code and dataset are available at https://github.com/nguyenvo09/CombatingFakeNews.