Question: What problem do the authors tackle in this paper?
Evidence: In this work we tackled the problem of the automatic classification of news articles in two domains, namely mainstream and disinformation news, with a language-independent approach which is based solely on the diffusion of news items on Twitter social platform. We disentangled different types of interactions on Twitter to accordingly build a multi-layer representation of news diffusion networks, and we computed a set of global network properties–separately for each layer–in order to encode each network with a tuple of features. Our goal was to investigate whether a multi-layer representation performs better than one layer BIBREF11, and to understand which of the features, observed at given layers, are most effective in the classification task.
Experiments with an off-the-shelf classifier such as Logistic Regression on datasets pertaining to two different media landscapes (US and Italy) yield very accurate classification results (AUROC up to 94%), even when accounting for the different political bias of news sources, which are far better than our baseline BIBREF11 with improvements up to 20%. Classification performances using single layers show that the layer of mentions alone entails better performance w.r.t other layers in both countries.
We also highlighted the most discriminative features across different layers in both countries; the results suggest that differences between the two news domains might be country-independent but rather due only to the typology of content shared, and that disinformation news shape broader and deeper cascades.
Additional experiments involving the temporal evolution of Twitter diffusion networks show that our methodology can accurate classify mainstream and disinformation news after a few hours of propagation on the platform.
Overall, our results prove that the topological features of multi-layer diffusion networks might be effectively exploited to detect online disinformation. We do not deny the presence of deceptive efforts to orchestrate the regular spread of information on social media via content amplification and manipulation BIBREF37BIBREF38. On the contrary, we postulate that such hidden forces might play to accentuate the discrepancies between the diffusion patterns of disinformation and mainstream news (and thus to make our methodology effective).
In the future we aim to further investigate three directions: (1) employ temporal networks to represent news diffusion and apply classification techniques that take into account the sequential aspect of data (e.g. recurrent neural networks); (2) carry out an extensive comparison of the diffusion of disinformation and mainstream news across countries to investigate deeper the presence of differences and similarities in sharing patterns; (3) leverage our network-based features in addition to state-of-the-art text-based approaches for "fake news" dete ction in order to deliver a real-world system to detect misleading and harmful information spreading on social media.
In this work we tackled the problem of the automatic classification of news articles in two domains, namely mainstream and disinformation news, with a language-independent approach which is based solely on the diffusion of news items on Twitter social platform.
Answer: The authors tackled the problem of the automatic classification of news articles in two domains, namely mainstream and disinformation news.