Evaluating Vulnerability to Fake News in Social Networks: A Community Health Assessment Model

摘要

Understanding the spread of false information in social networks has gained a lot of recent attention. In this paper, we explore the role community structures play in determining how people get exposed to fake news. Inspired by approaches in epidemiology, we propose a novel Community Health Assessment model, whose goal is to understand the vulnerability of communities to fake news spread. We define the concepts of neighbor, boundary and core nodes of a community and propose appropriate metrics to quantify the vulnerability of nodes (individual-level) and communities (group-level) to spreading fake news. We evaluate our model on communities identified using three popular community detection algorithms for twelve real-world news spreading networks collected from Twitter. Experimental results show that the proposed metrics perform significantly better on the fake news spreading networks than ^on the true news, indicating that our community health assessment model is effective.