Understanding how misleading and outright false information enters news ecosystems remains a difficult challenge that requires tracking how narratives spread across thousands of fringe and mainstream news websites. To do this, we introduce a system that utilizes encoder-based large language models and zero-shot stance detection to scalably identify and track news narratives and their attitudes across over 4,000 factually unreliable, mixed-reliability, and factually reliable English-language news websites. Running our system over an 18 month period, we track the spread of 146K news stories. Using network-based interference via the NETINF algorithm, we show that the paths of news narratives and the stances of websites toward particular entities can be used to uncover slanted propaganda networks (e.g., anti-vaccine and anti-Ukraine) and to identify the most influential websites in spreading these attitudes in the broader news ecosystem. We hope that increased visibility into our distributed news ecosystem can help with the reporting and fact-checking of propaganda and disinformation.
Encoder architectures play a pivotal role in neural news recommenders by embedding the semantic and contextual information of news and users. Thus, research has heavily focused on enhancing the representational capabilities of news and user encoders to improve recommender performance. Despite the significant impact of encoder architectures on the quality of news and user representations, existing analyses of encoder designs focus only on the overall downstream recommendation performance. This offers a one-sided assessment of the encoders' similarity, ignoring more nuanced differences in their behavior, and potentially resulting in sub-optimal model selection. In this work, we perform a comprehensive analysis of encoder architectures in neural news recommender systems. We systematically evaluate the most prominent news and user encoder architectures, focusing on their (i) representational similarity, measured with the Central Kernel Alignment, (ii) overlap of generated recommendation lists, quantified with the Jaccard similarity, and (iii) the overall recommendation performance. Our analysis reveals that the complexity of certain encoding techniques is often empirically unjustified,
Click-based news recommender systems suggest users content that aligns with their existing history, limiting the diversity of articles they encounter. Recent advances in aspect-based diversification -- adding features such as sentiments or news categories (e.g. world, politics) -- have made progress toward diversifying recommendations in terms of perspectives. However, these approaches often overlook the role of news framing, which shapes how stories are told by emphasizing specific angles or interpretations. In this paper, we treat media frames as a controllable aspect within the recommendation pipeline. By selecting articles based on a diversity of frames, our approach emphasizes varied narrative angles and broadens the interpretive space recommended to users. In addition to introducing frame-based diversification method, our work is the first to assess the impact of a news recommender system that integrates frame diversity using normative diversity metrics: representation, calibration, and activation. Our experiments based on media frame diversification show an improvement in exposure to previously unclicked frames up to 50%. This is important because repeated exposure to the sa
The proliferation of fake news poses a serious threat to society, as it can misinform and manipulate the public, erode trust in institutions, and undermine democratic processes. To address this issue, we present FakeSwarm, a fake news identification system that leverages the swarming characteristics of fake news. To extract the swarm behavior, we propose a novel concept of fake news swarming characteristics and design three types of swarm features, including principal component analysis, metric representation, and position encoding. We evaluate our system on a public dataset and demonstrate the effectiveness of incorporating swarm features in fake news identification, achieving an f1-score and accuracy of over 97% by combining all three types of swarm features. Furthermore, we design an online learning pipeline based on the hypothesis of the temporal distribution pattern of fake news emergence, validated on a topic with early emerging fake news and a shortage of text samples, showing that swarm features can significantly improve recall rates in such cases. Our work provides a new perspective and approach to fake news detection and highlights the importance of considering swarming c
Today, users are reading the news through social platforms. These platforms are built to facilitate crowd engagement, but not necessarily disseminate useful news to inform the masses. Hence, the news that is highly engaged with may not be the news that best informs. While predicting news popularity has been well studied, it has not been studied in the context of crowd manipulations. In this paper, we provide some preliminary results to a longer term project on crowd and platform manipulations of news and news popularity. In particular, we choose to study known features for predicting news popularity and how those features may change on reddit.com, a social platform used commonly for news aggregation. Along with this, we explore ways in which users can alter the perception of news through changing the title of an article. We find that news on reddit is predictable using previously studied sentiment and content features and that posts with titles changed by reddit users tend to be more popular than posts with the original article title.
News recommendations are complex, with diversity playing a vital role. So far, existing literature predominantly focuses on specific aspects of news diversity, such as viewpoints. In this paper, we introduce multi-aspect diversification in four distinct recommendation modes and outline the nuanced challenges in diversifying lists, sequences, summaries, and interactions. Our proposed research direction combines symbolic and subsymbolic artificial intelligence, leveraging both knowledge graphs and rule learning. We plan to evaluate our models using user studies to not only capture behavior but also their perceived experience. Our vision to balance news consumption points to other positive effects for users (e.g., increased serendipity) and society (e.g., decreased polarization).
News recommendation is one of the most challenging tasks in recommender systems, mainly due to the ephemeral relevance of news to users. As social media, and particularly microblogging applications like Twitter or Weibo, gains popularity as platforms for news dissemination, personalized news recommendation in this context becomes a significant challenge. We revisit news recommendation in the microblogging scenario, by taking into consideration social interactions and observations tracing how the information that is up for recommendation spreads in an underlying network. We propose a deep-learning based approach that is diffusion and influence-aware, called Influence-Graph News Recommender (IGNiteR). It is a content-based deep recommendation model that jointly exploits all the data facets that may impact adoption decisions, namely semantics, diffusion-related features pertaining to local and global influence among users, temporal attractiveness, and timeliness, as well as dynamic user preferences. To represent the news, a multi-level attention-based encoder is used to reveal the different interests of users. This news encoder relies on a CNN for the news content and on an attentive
News recommender systems play an increasingly influential role in shaping information access within democratic societies. However, tailoring recommendations to users' specific interests can result in the divergence of information streams. Fragmented access to information poses challenges to the integrity of the public sphere, thereby influencing democracy and public discourse. The Fragmentation metric quantifies the degree of fragmentation of information streams in news recommendations. Accurate measurement of this metric requires the application of Natural Language Processing (NLP) to identify distinct news events, stories, or timelines. This paper presents an extensive investigation of various approaches for quantifying Fragmentation in news recommendations. These approaches are evaluated both intrinsically, by measuring performance on news story clustering, and extrinsically, by assessing the Fragmentation scores of different simulated news recommender scenarios. Our findings demonstrate that agglomerative hierarchical clustering coupled with SentenceBERT text representation is substantially better at detecting Fragmentation than earlier implementations. Additionally, the analys
News recommendation plays a critical role in shaping the public's worldviews through the way in which it filters and disseminates information about different topics. Given the crucial impact that media plays in opinion formation, especially for sensitive topics, understanding the effects of personalized recommendation beyond accuracy has become essential in today's digital society. In this work, we present NeMig, a bilingual news collection on the topic of migration, and corresponding rich user data. In comparison to existing news recommendation datasets, which comprise a large variety of monolingual news, NeMig covers articles on a single controversial topic, published in both Germany and the US. We annotate the sentiment polarization of the articles and the political leanings of the media outlets, in addition to extracting subtopics and named entities disambiguated through Wikidata. These features can be used to analyze the effects of algorithmic news curation beyond accuracy-based performance, such as recommender biases and the creation of filter bubbles. We construct domain-specific knowledge graphs from the news text and metadata, thus encoding knowledge-level connections betw
We present MediaSpin, a large-scale language resource capturing how major news outlets modify headlines after publication, and MediaSpin-in-the-Wild, a complementary dataset linking these revised headlines to their downstream engagement on social media. The increasing editability of online news headlines offers new opportunities to study linguistic framing and bias through the lens of editorial revisions. The dataset contains 78,910 headline pairs annotated for 13 types of media bias, grounded in established media-bias taxonomies, covering both subjective (e.g., sensationalism, spin) and objective (e.g., omission, slant) forms, with annotation conducted through a human-supervised large-language-model pipeline with expert validation and quality control. We describe the annotation schema and demonstrate three downstream applications: (1) cross-national analysis of how country references are added or removed during editing, (2) transformer-based bias classification at both binary and fine-grained levels, and (3) behavioral analysis of biased headlines on X (Twitter) using 180,786 news-related tweets from 819 consenting users. The results reveal regional asymmetries in representational
The increasing popularity of social media promotes the proliferation of fake news, which has caused significant negative societal effects. Therefore, fake news detection on social media has recently become an emerging research area of great concern. With the development of multimedia technology, fake news attempts to utilize multimedia content with images or videos to attract and mislead consumers for rapid dissemination, which makes visual content an important part of fake news. Despite the importance of visual content, our understanding of the role of visual content in fake news detection is still limited. This chapter presents a comprehensive review of the visual content in fake news, including the basic concepts, effective visual features, representative detection methods and challenging issues of multimedia fake news detection. This chapter can help readers to understand the role of visual content in fake news detection, and effectively utilize visual content to assist in detecting multimedia fake news.
The problem of fake news has gained a lot of attention as it is claimed to have had a significant impact on 2016 US Presidential Elections. Fake news is not a new problem and its spread in social networks is well-studied. Often an underlying assumption in fake news discussion is that it is written to look like real news, fooling the reader who does not check for reliability of the sources or the arguments in its content. Through a unique study of three data sets and features that capture the style and the language of articles, we show that this assumption is not true. Fake news in most cases is more similar to satire than to real news, leading us to conclude that persuasion in fake news is achieved through heuristics rather than the strength of arguments. We show overall title structure and the use of proper nouns in titles are very significant in differentiating fake from real. This leads us to conclude that fake news is targeted for audiences who are not likely to read beyond titles and is aimed at creating mental associations between entities and claims.
There is a broad consensus that news media outlets incorporate ideological biases in their news articles. However, prior studies on measuring the discrepancies among media outlets and further dissecting the origins of thematic differences suffer from small sample sizes and limited scope and granularity. In this study, we use a large dataset of 1.8 million news headlines from major U.S. media outlets spanning from 2014 to 2022 to thoroughly track and dissect the fine-grained thematic discrepancy in U.S. news media. We employ multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) to quantify the fine-grained thematic discrepancy related to four prominent topics - domestic politics, economic issues, social issues, and foreign affairs in order to derive a more holistic analysis. Additionally, we compare the most frequent $n$-grams in media headlines to provide further qualitative insights into our analysis. Our findings indicate that on domestic politics and social issues, the discrepancy can be attributed to a certain degree of media bias. Meanwhile, the discrepancy in reporting foreign affairs is largely attributed to the diversity in individual journalistic styles. Finally, U.S. media outlets show
The complexity and diversity of today's media landscape provides many challenges for researchers studying news producers. These producers use many different strategies to get their message believed by readers through the writing styles they employ, by repetition across different media sources with or without attribution, as well as other mechanisms that are yet to be studied deeply. To better facilitate systematic studies in this area, we present a large political news data set, containing over 136K news articles, from 92 news sources, collected over 7 months of 2017. These news sources are carefully chosen to include well-established and mainstream sources, maliciously fake sources, satire sources, and hyper-partisan political blogs. In addition to each article we compute 130 content-based and social media engagement features drawn from a wide range of literature on political bias, persuasion, and misinformation. With the release of the data set, we also provide the source code for feature computation. In this paper, we discuss the first release of the data set and demonstrate 4 use cases of the data and features: news characterization, engagement characterization, news attributio
The use of the internet as a fast medium of spreading fake news reinforces the need for computational tools that combat it. Techniques that train fake news classifiers exist, but they all assume an abundance of resources including large labeled datasets and expert-curated corpora, which low-resource languages may not have. In this work, we make two main contributions: First, we alleviate resource scarcity by constructing the first expertly-curated benchmark dataset for fake news detection in Filipino, which we call "Fake News Filipino." Second, we benchmark Transfer Learning (TL) techniques and show that they can be used to train robust fake news classifiers from little data, achieving 91% accuracy on our fake news dataset, reducing the error by 14% compared to established few-shot baselines. Furthermore, lifting ideas from multitask learning, we show that augmenting transformer-based transfer techniques with auxiliary language modeling losses improves their performance by adapting to writing style. Using this, we improve TL performance by 4-6%, achieving an accuracy of 96% on our best model. Lastly, we show that our method generalizes well to different types of news articles, incl
This paper describes the second-placed system on the leaderboard of SemEval-2022 Task 8: Multilingual News Article Similarity. We propose an entity-enriched Siamese Transformer which computes news article similarity based on different sub-dimensions, such as the shared narrative, entities, location and time of the event discussed in the news article. Our system exploits a Siamese network architecture using a Transformer encoder to learn document-level representations for the purpose of capturing the narrative together with the auxiliary entity-based features extracted from the news articles. The intuition behind using all these features together is to capture the similarity between news articles at different granularity levels and to assess the extent to which different news outlets write about "the same events". Our experimental results and detailed ablation study demonstrate the effectiveness and the validity of our proposed method.
Detecting subjectivity in news sentences is crucial for identifying media bias, enhancing credibility, and combating misinformation by flagging opinion-based content. It provides insights into public sentiment, empowers readers to make informed decisions, and encourages critical thinking. While research has developed methods and systems for this purpose, most efforts have focused on English and other high-resourced languages. In this study, we present the first large dataset for subjectivity detection in Arabic, consisting of ~3.6K manually annotated sentences, and GPT-4o based explanation. In addition, we included instructions (both in English and Arabic) to facilitate LLM based fine-tuning. We provide an in-depth analysis of the dataset, annotation process, and extensive benchmark results, including PLMs and LLMs. Our analysis of the annotation process highlights that annotators were strongly influenced by their political, cultural, and religious backgrounds, especially at the beginning of the annotation process. The experimental results suggest that LLMs with in-context learning provide better performance. We aim to release the dataset and resources for the community.
Automatically identifying fake news from the Internet is a challenging problem in deception detection tasks. Online news is modified constantly during its propagation, e.g., malicious users distort the original truth and make up fake news. However, the continuous evolution process would generate unprecedented fake news and cheat the original model. We present the Fake News Evolution (FNE) dataset: a new dataset tracking the fake news evolution process. Our dataset is composed of 950 paired data, each of which consists of articles representing the three significant phases of the evolution process, which are the truth, the fake news, and the evolved fake news. We observe the features during the evolution and they are the disinformation techniques, text similarity, top 10 keywords, classification accuracy, parts of speech, and sentiment properties.
Misinformation spreading in mainstream and social media has been misleading users in different ways. Manual detection and verification efforts by journalists and fact-checkers can no longer cope with the great scale and quick spread of misleading information. This motivated research and industry efforts to develop systems for analyzing and verifying news spreading online. The SemEval-2023 Task 3 is an attempt to address several subtasks under this overarching problem, targeting writing techniques used in news articles to affect readers' opinions. The task addressed three subtasks with six languages, in addition to three ``surprise'' test languages, resulting in 27 different test setups. This paper describes our participating system to this task. Our team is one of the 6 teams that successfully submitted runs for all setups. The official results show that our system is ranked among the top 3 systems for 10 out of the 27 setups.
The generation and spread of fake news within new and online media sources is emerging as a phenomenon of high societal significance. Combating them using data-driven analytics has been attracting much recent scholarly interest. In this study, we analyze the textual coherence of fake news articles vis-a-vis legitimate ones. We develop three computational formulations of textual coherence drawing upon the state-of-the-art methods in natural language processing and data science. Two real-world datasets from widely different domains which have fake/legitimate article labellings are then analyzed with respect to textual coherence. We observe apparent differences in textual coherence across fake and legitimate news articles, with fake news articles consistently scoring lower on coherence as compared to legitimate news ones. While the relative coherence shortfall of fake news articles as compared to legitimate ones form the main observation from our study, we analyze several aspects of the differences and outline potential avenues of further inquiry.