FNED: A Deep Network for Fake News Early Detection on Social Media

The fast spreading of fake news stories on social media can cause inestimable social harm. Developing effective methods to detect them early is of paramount importance. A major challenge of fake news early detection is fully utilizing the limited data observed at the early stage of news propagation and then learning useful patterns from it for identifying fake news. In this article, we propose a novel deep neural network to detect fake news early. It has three novel components: (1) a status-sensitive crowd response feature extractor that extracts both text features and user features from combinations of users' text response and their corresponding user profiles, (2) a position-aware attention mechanism that highlights important user responses at specific ranking positions, and (3) a multi-region mean-pooling mechanism to perform feature aggregation based on multiple window sizes. Experimental results on two real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed model can detect fake news with greater than 90% accuracy within 5 minutes after it starts to spread and before it is retweeted 50 times, which is significantly faster than state-of-the-art baselines. Most importantly, our approach requires only 10% labeled fake news samples to achieve this effectiveness under PU-Learning settings.