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Multi-modal Analysis of Misleading Political News

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 12259))

Abstract

The internet is a valuable resource to openly share information or opinions. Unfortunately, such internet openness has also made it increasingly easy to abuse these platforms through the dissemination of misinformation. As people are generally awash in information, they can sometimes have difficulty discerning misinformation propagated on these web platforms from truthful information. They may also lean too heavily on information providers or social media platforms to curate information even though such providers do not commonly validate sources. In this paper, we focus on political news and present an analysis of misleading news according to different modalities, including news content (headline, body, and associated image) and source bias. Our findings show that hyperpartisan news sources are more likely to spread misleading stories than other sources and that it is not necessary to read news body content to assess its validity, but considering other modalities such as headlines, visual content, and publisher bias can achieve better performances.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    There are also some browser extensions that checks the source and further add the publisher bias to the news appearing in the social media feed [1].

  2. 2.

    https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-services/face/quickstarts/csharp.

  3. 3.

    https://www.pyimagesearch.com/2015/09/07/blur-detection-with-opencv/.

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Correspondence to Francesca Spezzano .

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Shrestha, A., Spezzano, F., Gurunathan, I. (2020). Multi-modal Analysis of Misleading Political News. In: van Duijn, M., Preuss, M., Spaiser, V., Takes, F., Verberne, S. (eds) Disinformation in Open Online Media. MISDOOM 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12259. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61841-4_18

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61841-4_18

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-61840-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-61841-4

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