Research on Fake News Detection Based on Diffusion Growth Rate

Abstract

With the rapid development of the Internet, social media has become a convenient online platform for users to obtain information, express opinions, and communicate with each other. Users are keen to participate in discussions on hot topics and exchange opinions on social media. A lot of fake news has also arisen at this moment. However, existing fake news detection methods have the problem of relying too much on textual features. Textual features are easy to be tampered with and deceive the detector; thus, it is difficult to distinguish fake news only by relying on textual features. To address the challenge, we propose a fake news detection method based on the diffusion growth rate (Delta-G). To identify the real and fake news, Delta-G uses graph convolutional networks to extract the diffusion structure features and then adopts the long-short-term memory networks to extract the growth rate features on time series. In the experiments, Delta-G is verified on two news datasets, Twitter and Weibo. Compared with the three detection methods of decision tree classifier, support vector machines with a propagation tree kernel, and RvNN, the accuracy of the Delta-G on the two datasets is improved by an average of 5% or more, which is better than all the baselines.