SoK: Machine Learning for Misinformation Detection

TL;DR

This paper critically examines the application of machine learning to misinformation detection, highlighting common methodological flaws, limited real-world effectiveness, and proposing improved evaluation practices and future research directions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive survey of existing literature, identifies prevalent errors, and demonstrates the limited efficacy of current methods through replication studies.

Findings

Detection methods often do not reflect real-world challenges.

Datasets and evaluations are frequently non-representative.

Current state-of-the-art has limited effectiveness in identifying human misinformation.

Abstract

We examine the disconnect between scholarship and practice in applying machine learning to trust and safety problems, using misinformation detection as a case study. We survey literature on automated detection of misinformation across a corpus of 248 well-cited papers in the field. We then examine subsets of papers for data and code availability, design missteps, reproducibility, and generalizability. Our paper corpus includes published work in security, natural language processing, and computational social science. Across these disparate disciplines, we identify common errors in dataset and method design. In general, detection tasks are often meaningfully distinct from the challenges that online services actually face. Datasets and model evaluation are often non-representative of real-world contexts, and evaluation frequently is not independent of model training. We demonstrate the limitations of current detection methods in a series of three representative replication studies. Based on the results of these analyses and our literature survey, we conclude that the current state-of-the-art in fully-automated misinformation detection has limited efficacy in detecting human-generated misinformation. We offer recommendations for evaluating applications of machine learning to trust and safety problems and recommend future directions for research.