Unsupervised Verification of Fake News by Public Opinion

0543203 - ÚTIA 2022 CZ eng V - Research Report
Grim, Jiří
Unsupervised Verification of Fake News by Public Opinion.
Praha: UTIA, 2021. 13 s. Research Report, 2390.
Institutional support: RVO:67985556
Keywords : weighted voting * unsupervised optimization
OECD category: Computer sciences, information science, bioinformathics (hardware development to be 2.2, social aspect to be 5.8)
http://library.utia.cas.cz/separaty/2021/RO/grim-0543203.pdf

In this paper we discuss a simple way to evaluate the messages in social networks automatically, without any special content analysis or external intervention. We presume, that a large number of social network participants is capable of a relatively reliable evaluation of materials presented in the network. Considering a simple binary evaluation scheme (like/dislike), we propose a transparent algorithm with the aim to increase the voting power of reliable network members by means of weights. The algorithm supports the votes which correlate with the more reliable weighted majority and, in turn, the modified weights improve the quality of the weighted majority voting. In this sense the weighting is controlled only by a general coincidence of voting members while the specific content of messages is unimportant. The iterative optimization procedure is unsupervised and does not require any external intervention with only one exception, as discussed in Sec. 5.2 .

In simulation experiments the algorithm nearly exactly identifies the reliable members by means of weights. Using the reinforced weights we can compute for a new message the weighted sum of votes as a quantitative measure of its positive or negative nature. In this way any fake news can be recognized as negative and indicated as controversial. The accuracy of the resulting weighted decision making was essentially higher than a simple majority voting and has been considerably robust with respect to possible external manipulations.

The main motivation of the proposed algorithm is its application in a large social network. The content of evaluated messages is unimportant, only the related decision making of participants is registered and compared with the weighted vote with the aim to identify the most reliable voters. A large number of participants and communicated messages should enable to design a reliable and robust weighted voting scheme. Ideally the resulting weighted vote should provide a generally acceptable emotional feedback for network participants and could be used to indicate positive or controversial news in a suitably chosen quantitative way. The optimization algorithm has to be simple, transparent and intuitive to make the weighted vote well acceptable as a general evaluation tool.

Permanent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11104/0320774