The emergence of social media as news sources has led to the rise of clickbait posts attempting to attract users to click on article links without informing them on the actual article content. This paper presents our efforts to create a clickbait detector inspired by fake news detection algorithms, and our submission to the Clickbait Challenge 2017. The detector is based almost exclusively on text-based features taken from previous work on clickbait detection, our own work on fake post detection, and features we designed specifically for the challenge. We use a two-level classification approach, combining the outputs of 65 first-level classifiers in a second-level feature vector. We present our exploratory results with individual features and their combinations, taken from the post text and the target article title, as well as feature selection. While our own blind tests with the dataset led to an F-score of 0.63, our final evaluation in the Challenge only achieved an F-score of 0.43. We explore the possible causes of this, and lay out potential future steps to achieve more successful results.
An increasing amount of posts on social media are used for disseminating news information and are accompanied by multimedia content. Such content may often be misleading or be digitally manipulated. More often than not, such pieces of content reach the front pages of major news outlets, having a detrimental effect on their credibility. To avoid such effects, there is profound need for automated methods that can help debunk and verify online content in very short time. To this end, we present a comparative study of three such methods that are catered for Twitter, a major social media platform used for news sharing. Those include: a) a method that uses textual patterns to extract claims about whether a tweet is fake or real and attribution statements about the source of the content; b) a method that exploits the information that same-topic tweets should be also similar in terms of credibility; and c) a method that uses a semi-supervised learning scheme that leverages the decisions of two independent credibility classifiers. We perform a comprehensive comparative evaluation of these approaches on datasets released by the Verifying Multimedia Use (VMU) task organized in the context of the 2015 and 2016 MediaEval benchmark. In addition to comparatively evaluating the three presented methods, we devise and evaluate a combined method based on their outputs, which outperforms all three of them. We discuss these findings and provide insights to guide future generations of verification tools for media professionals. We analyze the information credibility of news propagated through Twitter, a popular microblogging service. Previous research has shown that most of the messages posted on Twitter are truthful, but the service is also used to spread misinformation and false rumors, often unintentionally. On this paper we focus on automatic methods for assessing the credibility of a given set of tweets. Specifically, we analyze microblog postings related to "trending" topics, and classify them as credible or not credible, based on features extracted from them. We use features from users' posting and re-posting ("re-tweeting") behavior, from the text of the posts, and from citations to external sources. We evaluate our methods using a significant number of human assessments about the credibility of items on a recent sample of Twitter postings. Our results shows that there are measurable differences in the way messages propagate, that can be used to classify them automatically as credible or not credible, with precision and recall in the range of 70 to 80 .