Detecting Fake News Spreaders in Social Networks using Inductive Representation Learning

Rath, Bhavtosh; Salecha, Aadesh; Srivastava, Jaideep

An important aspect of preventing fake news dissemination is to proactively detect the likelihood of its spreading. Research in the domain of fake news spreader detection has not been explored much from a network analysis perspective. In this paper, we propose a graph neural network based approach to identify nodes that are likely to become spreaders of false information. Using the community health assessment model and interpersonal trust we propose an inductive representation learning framework to predict nodes of densely-connected community structures that are most likely to spread fake news, thus making the entire community vulnerable to the infection. Using topology and interaction based trust properties of nodes in real-world Twitter networks, we are able to predict false information spreaders with an accuracy of over 90%.