Can We Spot the "Fake News" Before It Was Even Written?
This addresses the crisis in fact-checking for online disinformation by shifting focus to preemptive outlet-level analysis, which could help millions of users avoid harmful content.
The paper tackles the problem of disinformation by proposing to fact-check entire news outlets in advance, rather than individual claims, to prevent the spread of fake news before it is written. They implement this in the Tanbih news aggregator by developing media profiles that assess factuality, propagandistic content, and other attributes.
Given the recent proliferation of disinformation online, there has been also growing research interest in automatically debunking rumors, false claims, and "fake news." A number of fact-checking initiatives have been launched so far, both manual and automatic, but the whole enterprise remains in a state of crisis: by the time a claim is finally fact-checked, it could have reached millions of users, and the harm caused could hardly be undone. An arguably more promising direction is to focus on fact-checking entire news outlets, which can be done in advance. Then, we could fact-check the news before it was even written: by checking how trustworthy the outlets that published it is. We describe how we do this in the Tanbih news aggregator, which makes readers aware of what they are reading. In particular, we develop media profiles that show the general factuality of reporting, the degree of propagandistic content, hyper-partisanship, leading political ideology, general frame of reporting, and stance with respect to various claims and topics.