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Fake news is important and there have been promises to detect and remove it but this might be more difficult to do automatically than you might think. It appears that fake news behaves a lot like real news.
Given the huge impact that Online Social Networks (OSN) had in the way people get informed and form their opinion, they became an attractive playground for malicious entities that want to spread misinformation, and leverage their effect. In fact, misinformation easily spreads on OSN and is a huge threat for modern society, possibly influencing also the outcome of elections, or even putting people’s life at risk (e.g., spreading „anti-vaccines“ misinformation). Therefore, it is of paramount importance for our society to have some sort of „validation“ on information spreading through OSN.
The need for a wide-scale validation would greatly benefit from automatic tools. In this paper, we show that it is difficult to carry out an automatic classification of misinformation considering only structural properties of content propagation cascades. We focus on structural properties, because they would be inherently difficult to be manipulated, with the aim of circumventing classification systems.
To support our claim, we carry out an extensive evaluation on Facebook posts belonging to conspiracy theories (as representative of misinformation), and scientific news (representative of fact-checked content). Our findings show that conspiracy content actually reverberates in a way which is hard to distinguish from the one scientific content does: for the classification mechanisms we investigated, classification F1-score never exceeds 0.65 during content propagation stages, and is still less than 0.7 even after propagation is complete.
And the conclusion is:
Our findings suggest that in Facebook users interact with different types of content in similar ways, reinforcing the hypothesis of echo chambers.
