Related papers: Why Do Urban Legends Go Viral?
In this paper we introduce Reddit legends, a collection of venerated old posts that have become famous on Reddit. To establish the utility of Reddit legends for both computational science/HCI and folkloristics, we investigate two main…
This paper aims to shed some light on the concept of virality - especially in social networks - and to provide new insights on its structure. We argue that: (a) virality is a phenomenon strictly connected to the nature of the content being…
Fear is a universal concept; people crave it in urban legends, scary movies, and modern stories. Open questions remain, however, about why these stories are scary and more generally what scares people. In this study, we explore these…
With the rise of social media, it has become easier to disseminate fake news faster and cheaper, compared to traditional news media, such as television and newspapers. Recently this phenomenon has attracted lot of public attention, because…
In recent years people have become increasingly reliant on social media to read news and get information, and some social media users post unsubstantiated information to gain attention. Such information is known as rumours. Nowadays, rumour…
While the purpose of most fake news is misinformation and political propaganda, our team sees it as a new type of myth that is created by people in the age of internet identities and artificial intelligence. Seeking insights on the fear and…
Rumour detection is hard because the most accurate systems operate retrospectively, only recognizing rumours once they have collected repeated signals. By then the rumours might have already spread and caused harm. We introduce a new…
Fake news can significantly misinform people who often rely on online sources and social media for their information. Current research on fake news detection has mostly focused on analyzing fake news content and how it propagates on a…
Recent work in the domain of misinformation detection has leveraged rich signals in the text and user identities associated with content on social media. But text can be strategically manipulated and accounts reopened under different…
Supervised machine learning models boast remarkable predictive capabilities. But can you trust your model? Will it work in deployment? What else can it tell you about the world? We want models to be not only good, but interpretable. And yet…
Fake news is a type of pervasive propaganda that spreads misinformation online, taking advantage of social media's extensive reach to manipulate public perception. Over the past three years, fake news has become a focal discussion point in…
Rumour spreading is a protocol for modelling the spread of information through a network via user-to-user interaction. The Spatial Preferred Attachment (SPA) model is a random graph model for complex networks: vertices are placed in a…
In this modern era, communication has become faster and easier. This means fallacious information can spread as fast as reality. Considering the damage that fake news kindles on the psychology of people and the fact that such news…
Social media platforms disseminate extensive volumes of online content, including true and, in particular, false rumors. Previous literature has studied the diffusion of offline rumors, yet more research is needed to understand the…
The prevalence of many urban phenomena changes systematically with population size. We propose a theory that unifies models of economic complexity and cultural evolution to derive urban scaling. The theory accounts for the difference in…
The meaning of a slang term can vary in different communities. However, slang semantic variation is not well understood and under-explored in the natural language processing of slang. One existing view argues that slang semantic variation…
With the development of social media, various rumors can be easily spread on the Internet and such rumors can have serious negative effects on society. Thus, it has become a critical task for social media platforms to deal with suspected…
We study the diffusion of a true and a false message (the rumor) in a social network. Upon hearing a message, individuals may believe it, disbelieve it, or debunk it through costly verification. Whenever the truth survives in steady state,…
Can we predict the future popularity of a song, movie or tweet? Recent work suggests that although it may be hard to predict an item's popularity when it is first introduced, peeking into its early adopters and properties of their social…
With the increasing popularity of smart devices, rumors with multimedia content become more and more common on social networks. The multimedia information usually makes rumors look more convincing. Therefore, finding an automatic approach…