Mining Disinformation and Fake News: Concepts, Methods, and Recent Advancements

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent advancements in detecting and understanding disinformation and fake news on social media, highlighting challenges, methods, and emerging issues to aid researchers and practitioners.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of concepts, detection techniques, and recent progress in combating disinformation, including a weak supervision approach for limited data scenarios.

Findings

Identification of different types of information disorder

Emerging tasks in disinformation characterization and detection

Discussion of ethical and technological trending issues

Abstract

In recent years, disinformation including fake news, has became a global phenomenon due to its explosive growth, particularly on social media. The wide spread of disinformation and fake news can cause detrimental societal effects. Despite the recent progress in detecting disinformation and fake news, it is still non-trivial due to its complexity, diversity, multi-modality, and costs of fact-checking or annotation. The goal of this chapter is to pave the way for appreciating the challenges and advancements via: (1) introducing the types of information disorder on social media and examine their differences and connections; (2) describing important and emerging tasks to combat disinformation for characterization, detection and attribution; and (3) discussing a weak supervision approach to detect disinformation with limited labeled data. We then provide an overview of the chapters in this book that represent the recent advancements in three related parts: (1) user engagements in the dissemination of information disorder; (2) techniques on detecting and mitigating disinformation; and (3) trending issues such as ethics, blockchain, clickbaits, etc. We hope this book to be a convenient entry point for researchers, practitioners, and students to understand the problems and challenges, learn state-of-the-art solutions for their specific needs, and quickly identify new research problems in their domains.