Automatic ground truth dataset creation for fake news detection in social media

Abstract

Fake news has become over the last years one of the most crucial issues for social media platforms, users and news organizations. Therefore, research has focused on developing algorithmic methods to detect misleading content on social media. These approaches are data-driven, meaning that the efficiency of the produced models depends on the quality of the training dataset. Although several ground truth datasets have been created, they suffer from serious limitations and rely heavily on human annotators. In this work, we propose a method for automating as far as possible the process of dataset creation. Such datasets can be subsequently used as training and test data in machine learning classification techniques regarding fake news detection in microblogging platforms, such as Twitter.