FakeSpreadersWhatsApp.BR: Misinformation Spreaders Detection in Brazilian Portuguese WhatsApp Messages

Abstract

In the past few years, the large-scale dissemination of misinformation through social media has become a critical issue. In many developing countries such as Brazil, India, and Mexico, one of the primary sources of misinformation is the messaging application WhatsApp. Recently, a few methods for automatic misinformation detection for the WhatsApp platform were proposed. On the other hand, identifying users who spread fake news is another key aspect of mitigating misinformation dissemination effectively. However, features to describe users on the WhatsApp platform were not found in the literature. This paper proposes a set of 23 features and two approaches (a supervised and another unsupervised) to identify possible misinformation spreaders on WhatsApp. Our results indicate that the proposed features can be used to distinguish between potential misinformation spreaders and users who share credible information with a F1 Score of 0.923.