ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ

Presenter: Anastasia Giachanou

Abstract

The rise of social media has offered a fast and easy way for the propagation of fake news, conspiracy theories and other types of disinformation. Despite the research attention that it has received, fake news detection remains an open problem and users keep sharing articles that contain false statements but which they consider real. In this presentation, I will focus on the role of users in the propagation of different types of disinformation. First, I will focus on the problem of discriminating between users that are potential fact checkers and those that are potential fake news spreaders. To this end, I will present a model that aims to address this problem by leveraging features that represent users’ personality traits and linguistic patterns extracted from users' tweets. Then, I will provide an analysis of profile and psycho-linguistic characteristics of online users that tend to propagate posts that support conspiracy theories and of those who propagate posts that refute them. I will conclude with a discussion on the open challenges of the area.

Anastasia Giachanou is a postdoc researcher at the Department of Methodology and Statistics at Utrecht ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ.