Towards Impact Scoring of Fake News

Tackling fake news has become one of the highest priority issues in recent years. Its effects are damaging, and urgent attention needs to be paid to find a solution. Although several approaches have been proposed to understand the characteristics of fake news, not much attention has been given to determining its impact. Fake news can also be casual opinions or sarcasm, entertainment-related media stories, which pose no risk. Alternatively, there are some high impact news stories which causes panic, confusion, rumors and is responsible for real damage. Hence, in this paper, we propose a model to calculate the impact score of a given fake news story. The proposed model integrates various factors related to fake news, such as the scope of the news, the reputation of the publishing site, and the popularity of the proliferator. We validate the results of the proposed impact computation model with user surveys.