Counteracting the contemporaneous proliferation of digital forgeries and fake news

Abstract

Fake news has been certainly the expression of the moment: from political round table discussions to newspapers to social and mainstream media. It is everywhere. With such an intense discussion and yet few effective ways to combat it, what can be done? Providing methods to fight back even the least harming hoax is a social responsibility. To look for authenticity in a wide sea of fake news, every detail is a lead. Image appearance and semantic content of text and images are some of the main properties, which can be analyzed to reveal even the slightest lie. In this vein, this work overviews some recent methods applicable to the verification of dubious content in text and images, and discusses how we can put them together as an option to curb away the proliferation of unverified and phony “facts”. We briefly present the main idea behind each method, highlighting real situations where they can be applied and discussing expected results. Ultimately, we show how new research areas are working to seamlessly stitch together all these methods so as to provide a unified analysis and to establish the synchronization in space and time — the X-Coherence — of heterogeneous sources of information documenting real-world events.