FakeSens: A Social Sensing Approach to COVID-19 Misinformation Detection on Social Media

Ziyi Kou, Lanyu Shang, Yang Zhang, Christina Youn, Dong Wang

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Social sensing is emerging as an effective and pervasive sensing paradigm to collect timely data and observations from human sensors. This paper focuses on the problem of COVID-19 misinformation detection on social media. Our work is motivated by the lack of COVID-specific knowledge in current misinformation detection solutions, which is critical to assess the truthfulness of social media claims about the emerging COVID-19 disease. In this paper, we leverage human intelligence on a crowdsourcing platform to obtain essential knowledge facts for detecting the COVID-19 misinformation on social media. Two critical challenges exist in solving our problem: i) how to efficiently acquire accurate and timely knowledge that is both inclusive and specific to COVID-19? ii) How to effectively coordinate the efforts from both expert and non-expert workers to detect COVID-19 misinformation? To address these challenges, we develop FakeSens, a social sensing based crowd knowledge graph approach that explicitly explores the knowledge facts specific to COVID-19 and models the reliability of different types of crowd workers to capture the misleading COVID-19 claims. Evaluation results on a real-world dataset show that FakeSens significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in accurately detecting misleading claims of COVID-19 on social media.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - 17th Annual International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems, DCOS 2021
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages140-147
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)9781665439299
DOIs
StatePublished - 2021
Externally publishedYes
Event17th Annual International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems, DCOS 2021 - Virtual, Online, Cyprus
Duration: Jul 14 2021Jul 16 2021

Publication series

NameProceedings - 17th Annual International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems, DCOS 2021

Conference

Conference17th Annual International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems, DCOS 2021
Country/TerritoryCyprus
CityVirtual, Online
Period7/14/217/16/21

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Instrumentation

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