Detecting misinformation threads is crucial to guarantee a healthy environment on social media. We address the problem using the data set created during the COVID-19 pandemic. It contains cascades of tweets discussing information weakly labeled as reliable or unreliable, based on a previous evaluation of the information source. The models identifying unreliable threads usually rely on textual features. But reliability is not just what is said, but by whom and to whom. We additionally leverage on network information. Following the homophily principle, we hypothesize that users who interact are generally interested in similar topics and spreading similar kind of news, which in turn is generally reliable or not. We test several methods to learn representations of the social interactions within the cascades, combining them with deep neural language models in a Multi-Input (MI) framework. Keeping track of the sequence of the interactions during the time, we improve over previous state-of-the-art models.

An American University math professor and his team created a statistical model that can be used to detect misinformation in social posts. The model also avoids the problem of black boxes that occur in machine learning. With the use of algorithms and computer models, machine learning is increasingly playing a role in helping to stop the spread of misinformation, but a main challenge for scientists is the black box of unknowability, where researchers don't understand how the machine arrives at the same decision as human trainers. Using a Twitter dataset with misinformation tweets about COVID-19, Zois Boukouvalas, assistant professor in AU's Department of Mathematics and Statistics in the College of Arts and Sciences, shows how statistical models can detect misinformation in social media during events like a pandemic or a natural disaster. In newly published research, Boukouvalas and his colleagues, including AU student Caitlin Moroney and Computer Science Prof. Nathalie Japkowicz, also show how the model's decisions align with those made by humans.

An American University math professor and his team created a statistical model that can be used to detect misinformation in social posts. The model also avoids the problem of black boxes that occur in machine learning. With the use of algorithms and computer models, machine learning is increasingly playing a role in helping to stop the spread of misinformation, but a main challenge for scientists is the black box of unknowability, where researchers don't understand how the machine arrives at the same decision as human trainers. Using a Twitter dataset with misinformation tweets about COVID-19, Zois Boukouvalas, assistant professor in AU's Department of Mathematics and Statistics, College of Arts and Sciences, shows how statistical models can detect misinformation in social media during events like a pandemic or a natural disaster. In newly published research, Boukouvalas and his colleagues, including AU student Caitlin Moroney and Computer Science Prof. Nathalie Japkowicz, also show how the model's decisions align with those made by humans.

With the use of algorithms and computer models, machine learning is increasingly playing a role in helping to stop the spread of misinformation, but a main challenge for scientists is the black box of unknowability, where researchers don't understand how the machine arrives at the same decision as human trainers. Using a Twitter dataset with misinformation tweets about COVID-19, Zois Boukouvalas, assistant professor in AU's Department of Mathematics and Statistics, College of Arts and Sciences, shows how statistical models can detect misinformation in social media during events like a pandemic or a natural disaster. In newly published research, Boukouvalas and his colleagues, including AU student Caitlin Moroney and Computer Science Prof. Nathalie Japkowicz, also show how the model's decisions align with those made by humans. "We would like to know what a machine is thinking when it makes decisions, and how and why it agrees with the humans that trained it," Boukouvalas said. "We don't want to block someone's social media account because the model makes a biased decision."

If you use such social media websites as Facebook and Twitter, you may have come across posts flagged with warnings about misinformation. So far, most misinformation – flagged and unflagged – has been aimed at the general public. Imagine the possibility of misinformation – information that is false or misleading – in scientific and technical fields like cybersecurity, public safety and medicine. There is growing concern about misinformation spreading in these critical fields as a result of common biases and practices in publishing scientific literature, even in peer-reviewed research papers. As a graduate student and as faculty members doing research in cybersecurity, we studied a new avenue of misinformation in the scientific community.

If you use such social media websites as Facebook and Twitter, you may have come across posts flagged with warnings about misinformation. So far, most misinformation – flagged and unflagged – has been aimed at the general public. Imagine the possibility of misinformation – information that is false or misleading – in scientific and technical fields like cybersecurity, public safety and medicine. There is growing concern about misinformation spreading in these critical fields as a result of common biases and practices in publishing scientific literature, even in peer-reviewed research papers. As a graduate student and as faculty members doing research in cybersecurity, we studied a new avenue of misinformation in the scientific community.

If you use such social media websites as Facebook and Twitter, you may have come across posts flagged with warnings about misinformation. So far, most misinformation – flagged and unflagged – has been aimed at the general public. Imagine the possibility of misinformation – information that is false or misleading – in scientific and technical fields like cybersecurity, public safety and medicine. There is growing concern about misinformation spreading in these critical fields as a result of common biases and practices in publishing scientific literature, even in peer-reviewed research papers. As a graduate student and as faculty members doing research in cybersecurity, we studied a new avenue of misinformation in the scientific community.