Seeking provenance of information using social media

Abstract

Social media propagates breaking news and disinformation alike fast and on an unsurpassed scale. Because of its democratizing nature, social media users can easily produce, receive, and propagate a piece of information without necessarily providing traceable information. Thus, there are no means for a user to verify the provenance (aka sources or originators) of information. The disinformation can cause tragic consequences to society and individuals. This work aims to take advantage of characteristics of social media to provide a solution to the problem of lacking traceable information. Such knowledge can provide additional context to received information such that a user can assess how much value, trust, and validity should be placed in it. In this paper, we are studying a novel research problem that facilitates the seeking of the provenance of information for a few known recipients (less than 1% of the total recipients) by recovering the paths it has taken from its originators. The proposed methodology exploits easily computable node centralities of a large social media network. The experimental results with Facebook and Twitter datasets show that the proposed mechanism is effective in correctly identifying the additional recipients and seeking the provenance of information.