The whole world is at our fingertips and all gratitude to social media. Social media platforms were delivering people an opportunity to connect across distances. There are always two sides to a coin and the same happens with social media.
The timeliness and transparency of social media platforms have widely promoted the creation and dissemination of misinformation including rumor, spam, and fake news. How to distinguish between real facts and misinformation has become an important challenge to social media. This misinformation propagates to a large number of people rapidly bringing unprecedented challenges.
The direct way to identify misinformation spreaders from social networks is to check their content information as they are defined by the content they create. The nature of information has become a serious issue, which affects organizations and society. Misinformation spreaders manage the content to look genuine, so it is very difficult to get helpful highlights from content for these social media platforms. It is very difficult to acquire the actual truth for disclosing misinformation. Misinformation is classified based on content, source, and dispersion.
Modern social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp, etc. offer a rich ground for the spread of misinformation. The inspiration behind misinformation spreads through social media remains unknown. The abundance of data sources and the age of malicious acts make it hard to combat its spread. Social media platforms have modified their algorithms to block the spread of fake news. But the issue still exists.
Misinformation is usually spread by specific accounts that stay aside from regular social media users. They manipulate social media platforms to abstain from being identified. There is a need to bring a few best in class approaches that are adaptable to such assaults with systems and networks. The content of misinformation can be manipulated to be pretty similar to the content of true news. Similar messages usually lead to information diffusion that is expected to be spread from similar sources in similar sequences by similar people.
Most social media platforms are free to register and readily accessible. It is now risky to depend on data from social media for decision making due to the new challenges brought by misinformation. The ample amount of online data provides an insight into the public opinion that has been employed for predicting the election results or stock price. During the 2016 U.S. election, thousands of bot accounts were found to intentionally spread misinformation.
