Seeking provenance of information using social media

Pritam Gundecha, Zhuo Feng, Huan Liu

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

18 Scopus citations

Abstract

Social media propagates breaking news and disinformation alike fast and on an unsurpassed scale. Because of its democratizing nature, social media users can easily produce, receive, and propagate a piece of information without necessarily providing traceable information. Thus, there is no means for a user to verify the provenance (aka sources or originators) of information. The disinformation can cause tragic consequences to society and individuals. This work aims to take advantage of characteristics of social media to provide a solution to the problem of lacking traceable information. Such knowledge can provide additional context to the received information so that a user can assess how much value, trust, and validity should be placed on it. In this paper, we are studying a novel research problem that facilitates the seeking of the provenance of information for a few known recipients (less than 1% of the total recipients) by recovering the paths it has taken from its originators. The proposed methodology exploits easily computable node centralities of a large social media network. The experimental results with Facebook and Twitter datasets show that the proposed mechanism is effective in correctly identifying the additional recipients and seeking the provenance of information.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationCIKM 2013 - Proceedings of the 22nd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management
Pages1691-1696
Number of pages6
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 11 2013
Event22nd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, CIKM 2013 - San Francisco, CA, United States
Duration: Oct 27 2013Nov 1 2013

Publication series

NameInternational Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, Proceedings

Other

Other22nd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, CIKM 2013
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySan Francisco, CA
Period10/27/1311/1/13

Keywords

  • Information propagation
  • Information provenance
  • Node centrality
  • Provenance paths
  • Social media

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General Decision Sciences
  • General Business, Management and Accounting

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