EAGER: Live Reality: Sustainable and Up-to-Date Information Quality in Live Social Media through Continuous Evidence-Based Knowledge Acquisition

Social media have complemented traditional press with immediate reports and worldwide coverage. However, they also receive and propagate significant amounts of misinformation and disinformation such as fake news. A skillful mixture of verifiable facts and outrageous fiction, fake news aim to attract reader attention, make an immediate initial impact, and then quickly forgotten. Even as disposable novelty, fake news have had significant impact on real world events such as elections. For human readers and machine learning (ML) classifiers, distinguishing fake news from real news has been challenging due to their sophisticated construction, camouflaging fiction with facts, as well as continuously evolving by incorporating the newest and hottest topics as they mutate. The Live Reality project will track the evolution of fake news through continuous import of reliable, verified facts from authoritative sources, and separate the facts from fiction, to catch fake news in the act. The automated real-time tracking capability is a significant innovation compared to traditional ML classifiers generated from manually labeled training data, which are constrained to finding historical fake news, long after the fact.

Given the short lifespan of disposable novelty (days or hours), catching fake news in the act requires significant innovation in two dimensions. First, the ML classifier must be continuously updated to recognize true novelty that have never been seen before. Second, the update must be sufficiently timely to catch disposable novelty before they expire, e.g., within hours of their initial dissemination. Continuous collection of live social media and authoritative sources will generate novel fake news and associated ground truth, which are integrated through the Evidence-Based Knowledge Acquisition (EBKA) approach, which adds reliable information from authoritative sources into a continuously adaptive teamed classifier to distinguish the verifiable facts from the fiction in fake news. As news topics evolve, fake news are expected to follow, and EBKA will generate and integrate new sub-models into the live teamed classifier to recognize the new topics. The EBKA approach will be demonstrated on live data containing fake news on a variety of topics, specifically disaster management such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to the disposable novelty nature of fake news, EBKA will be evaluated in two dimensions: classifier performance in terms of accuracy and precision, and timeliness of classifier identifying truly new fake news soon after their appearance in the real world.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.