"This is Fake! Shared it by Mistake": Assessing the Intent of Fake News Spreaders
This addresses the issue of fake news spread for social media platforms and researchers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing detection methods by adding intent modeling.
The paper tackles the problem of distinguishing between intentional and unintentional spreading of fake news by assessing spreaders' intent, and the results show that this assessment significantly differentiates between the two types and improves fake news detection techniques.
Individuals can be misled by fake news and spread it unintentionally without knowing it is false. This phenomenon has been frequently observed but has not been investigated. Our aim in this work is to assess the intent of fake news spreaders. To distinguish between intentional versus unintentional spreading, we study the psychological explanations of unintentional spreading. With this foundation, we then propose an influence graph, using which we assess the intent of fake news spreaders. Our extensive experiments show that the assessed intent can help significantly differentiate between intentional and unintentional fake news spreaders. Furthermore, the estimated intent can significantly improve the current techniques that detect fake news. To our best knowledge, this is the first work to model individuals' intent in fake news spreading.