Fake news, disinformation and misinformation in social media: a review.

Online social networks (OSNs) are rapidly growing and have become a huge source of all kinds of global and local news for millions of users. However, OSNs are a double-edged sword. Although the great advantages they offer such as unlimited easy communication and instant news and information, they can also have many disadvantages and issues. One of their major challenging issues is the spread of fake news. Fake news identification is still a complex unresolved issue. Furthermore, fake news detection on OSNs presents unique characteristics and challenges that make finding a solution anything but trivial. On the other hand, artificial intelligence (AI) approaches are still incapable of overcoming this challenging problem. To make matters worse, AI techniques such as machine learning and deep learning are leveraged to deceive people by creating and disseminating fake content. Consequently, automatic fake news detection remains a huge challenge, primarily because the content is designed in a way to closely resemble the truth, and it is often hard to determine its veracity by AI alone without additional information from third parties. This work aims to provide a comprehensive and systematic review of fake news research as well as a fundamental review of existing approaches used to detect and prevent fake news from spreading via OSNs. We present the research problem and the existing challenges, discuss the state of the art in existing approaches for fake news detection, and point out the future research directions in tackling the challenges.

Manipulation and Malicious Personalization: Exploring the Self-Disclosure Biases Exploited by Deceptive Attackers on Social Media.

In the real world, the disclosure of private information to others often occurs after a trustworthy relationship has been established. Conversely, users of Social Network Sites (SNSs) like Facebook or Instagram often disclose large amounts of personal information prematurely to individuals which are not necessarily trustworthy. Such a low privacy-preserving behavior is often exploited by deceptive attackers with harmful intentions. Basically, deceivers approach their victims in online communities using incentives that motivate them to share their private information, and ultimately, their credentials. Since motivations, such as financial or social gain vary from individual to individual, deceivers must wisely choose their incentive strategy to mislead the users. Consequently, attacks are crafted to each victim based on their particular information-sharing motivations. This work analyses, through an online survey, those motivations and cognitive biases which are frequently exploited by deceptive attackers in SNSs. We propose thereafter some countermeasures for each of these biases to provide personalized privacy protection against deceivers.