Exploring Fake News Detection with Heterogeneous Social Media Context Graphs

Abstract

Fake news detection has become a research area that goes way beyond a purely academic interest as it has direct implications on our society as a whole. Recent advances have primarily focused on text-based approaches. However, it has become clear that to be effective one needs to incorporate additional, contextual information such as spreading behaviour of news articles and user interaction patterns on social media. We propose to construct heterogeneous social context graphs around news articles and reformulate the problem as a graph classification task. Exploring the incorporation of different types of information (to get an idea as to what level of social context is most effective) and using different graph neural network architectures indicates that this approach is highly effective with robust results on a common benchmark dataset.