Fake spreader is narcissist; Real spreader is Machiavellian prediction of fake news diffusion using psycho-sociological facets

Abstract

Fake news reference to misleading or false articles that is been spread on social network. The diffusion of misleading information on social network causes an impact on civil life of the people in terms of psychological, financial etc., which makes them difficult to lead their life in the society. Therefore, developing a system to predict the diffusion of fake news is essential. This paper proposes a fake news diffusion prediction model involving several psycho-sociological facets of social media users. The underlying presumptions are two-fold: (a) it is essential to understand the probable impact of a posted fake news message, i.e., how many persons will be influenced by the information spread; and (b) although information propagation is a well-explored topic, most of the work has been restricted to network topological analysis. To this end, we present psycho-sociological analysis as a better alternative to understand fake propagation in a social network, with the aim to answer a few fundamental questions: (i) Who initiates fake posts on social media? (ii) Who consumes (replies to, shares, or likes) such comments? (iii) Can we model fake news diffusion better if we know the psycho-sociological traits of individuals towards fakeful content?To present psycho-sociological analysis, we bring in three different dimensions of human behavior: personality (Big-5: Openness, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, and nNeuroticism), values & ethics (Schwartz model: Self-Direction, Stimulation, Hedonism, Achievement, Power, Security, Conformity, Tradition, Benevolence and Universalism), and the dark side of the personality (dark triad: Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and Psychopathy). The Big5 model describes five essential person-level traits, the values & ethics model depicts societal behavior, and the dark triad model encapsulates the dark side of human personality.We develop a suite of classifiers to detect behavioral traits. We also propose a model to predict the diffusion of fake news and classifier to classify user as fake or real. Various empirical studies are reported in this paper in order to comprehend how human behavioral traits correlate with online fake spreader and fake posting user behavior. From our empirical analysis some of the key observations found are: (i) fake posts on social media are commonly started by people with neurotic personality. (ii) People who spread political fake posts are traditional and power oriented. (iii) Fake user is extrovert and neurotic in nature, and those who post fake and real news on social networks tend to have balanced dark side behavior. The proposed models also outperform state-of-the-art with a significant margin.