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. / Doctor of Philosophy / A rumor is generally defined as an interesting piece of a story that cannot be authenticated easily. On social networks, a user can generally find an interesting piece of news or story and may share (retweet) it. A story that initially appears plausible can later turn out to be false or remain unverified. The propagation of false rumors on social networks has a deteriorating effect on user experience. Therefore, rumor veracity detection is important, and drawing interest in social network research. In this thesis, we develop various machine learning models that detect rumor veracity. For this purpose, we exploit different types of information regarding users, such as profile details and connectivity with other users etc. Moreover, we propose a rumor mitigation technique that recommends fact-checking URLs to social network users who are passionate about debunking rumors. Here, we leverage similar techniques used in e-commerce sites for recommending products to solve this problem.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/99057 |
| Date | 19 June 2020 |
| Creators | Islam, Mohammad Raihanul |
| Contributors | Computer Science, Ramakrishnan, Naren, Lu, Chang-Tien, Liu, Huan, Reddy, Chandan K., Prakash, B. Aditya |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Dissertation |
| Format | ETD, application/pdf |
| Rights | In Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
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