Combating Disinformation in a Social Media Age
This is an incremental review paper addressing the problem of disinformation for social media users and researchers.
The paper provides an overview of techniques for combating disinformation on social media, discussing its forms, spread factors, detection challenges, and mitigation approaches through education, research, and collaboration, without presenting new experimental results or concrete numbers.
The creation, dissemination, and consumption of disinformation and fabricated content on social media is a growing concern, especially with the ease of access to such sources, and the lack of awareness of the existence of such false information. In this paper, we present an overview of the techniques explored to date for the combating of disinformation with various forms. We introduce different forms of disinformation, discuss factors related to the spread of disinformation, elaborate on the inherent challenges in detecting disinformation, and show some approaches to mitigating disinformation via education, research, and collaboration. Looking ahead, we present some promising future research directions on disinformation.