TIB's visual analytics group at MediaEval '20

Detecting fake news on corona virus and 5G conspiracy

authored by

Gullal S. Cheema, Sherzod Hakimov, Ralph Ewerth

Abstract

Fake news on social media has become a hot topic of research as it negatively impacts the discourse of real news in the public. Specifically, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has seen a rise of inaccurate and misleading information due to the surrounding controversies and unknown details at the beginning of the pandemic. The FakeNews task at MediaEval 2020 tackles this problem by creating a challenge to automatically detect tweets containing misinformation based on text and structure from Twitter follower network. In this paper, we present a simple approach that uses BERT embeddings and a shallow neural network for classifying tweets using only text, and discuss our findings and limitations of the approach in text-based misinformation detection.

Organisation(s)

L3S Research Centre

External Organisation(s)

German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB)

Type

Conference contribution

Publication date

2020

Publication status

Published

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Computer Science(all)

Electronic version(s)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2101.03529 (Access: Open)
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2882/paper56.pdf (Access: Open)