StanceComp: Aggregating Stances from Multiple Sources for Rumor Detection

Abstract

With the rapid development of the Internet, social media has become a major information dissemination platform where any users can post and share information. Although this facilitates the share of breaking news, it also becomes the fertile land for the spread of malicious rumors. On the contrary, online news media might lag behind on reporting breaking news but their articles are more reliable since the journalists often go to verify the information before they report it. Intuitively, when users try to decide whether to trust a claim they saw on the social media, they would want to check stances of the same claim on social media and news media. More specifically, they want to know the opinions of other users, i.e., whether they support or against the claim. To facilitate such a process, we develop StanceComp(https://stancecomp.herokuapp.com ), which aggregates the relevant information about a claim and compares the stances of the claim for both social media and news media. The developed system aims to provide a summary of the stances for the claim so that users can have a more comprehensive understanding of the information to detect potential rumors.