Modeling the Sharing and Diffusion of Fake News in Social Media

The use of social media platforms has been gradually increasing and fake news spreading is becoming an alarming issue nowadays. The spreading of fake news means disseminating false, confusing, and spurious information which hurts families, communities etc. As a result, this issue has to be resolved sooner so that we can limit the spread of fake news in the virtual world. One needs to identify the fake news spreader to address this issue. In this research, we have tried to reveal the users who are most likely to share fake news as well as the spread prediction that shared pieces of fake news in the social network. We take into account the users' information, such as follower counts, like counts, and retweet counts along with users' topical interests on different topics as well as connection strength by considering the follower-following ratio. We also consider the complexity features, stylistic features, and psychological effects of news. Finally, we applied different machine-learning algorithms to evaluate the performance of the proposed model. Our observation is that the probability of spreading a piece of news shared by users having more followers as well as more likes and retweet counts (aka influential users) is higher compared with other users.