All the Wiser: Fake News Intervention Using User Reading Preferences

Abstract

To address the increasingly significant issue of fake news, we develop a news reading platform in which we propose an implicit approach to reduce people's belief in fake news. Specifically, we leverage reinforcement learning to learn an intervention module on top of a recommender system (RS) such that the module is activated to replace RS to recommend news toward the verification once users touch the fake news. To examine the effect of the proposed method, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation with 89 human subjects and check the effective rate of change in belief but without their other limitations. Moreover, 84% participants indicate the proposed platform can help them defeat fake news. The demo video is available on YouTube https://youtu.be/wKI6nuXu-SM.