Introduction
Identifying fake news is increasingly being recognized as an important computational task with high potential social impact. Misinformation is routinely injected into almost every domain of news including politics, health, science, business, etc., among which, the fake news in the health domain poses serious risk and harm to health and well-being in modern societies. With most fake news datasets being focused on microblogging websites in the political domain making them less suitable for content-focused misinformation identification tasks as warranted by the domain of health, we curated a dataset of fake and legitimate news articles within the topic of health and well being. For legitimate news, we crawled 500 health and well-being articles from reputable sources such as CNN, NYTimes, New Indian Express and, many others, manually double-checked for truthfulness. For fake news, we crawled 500 articles on similar topics from well reported misinformation websites such as BeforeItsNews, Nephef, MadWorldNews, and many others.
Dataset Statistics
| Dataset | Class | Total Number of Documents in the Class |
Average Words per Document |
Average Sentences per Document |
Total Number of Words |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Health and Well Being (HWB) |
Real | 500 | 724 | 31 | 362117 |
| Fake | 500 | 578 | 28 | 289477 |
Examples of health fake news headlines and excerpts
Russian Scientist Captures Soul Leaving Body; Quantifies Chakras
It uses a small electrical current that is connected to the fingertips and takes less than a millisecond to send signals from. When these electric charges are pulsed through the body, our bodies naturally respond with a kind of ‘electron cloud’ made up of light photons. Korotkov also used a type of Kirlian photography to show the exact moment someone’s soul left their body at the time of death! He says there is a blue life force you can see leaving the body. He says the navel and the head are the first parts of us to lose their life force and the heart and groin are the last. In other cases, he’s noted that the soul of people who have had violent or unexpected deaths can manifest in a state of confusion and their consciousness doesn’t actually know that they have died.
People
- 1. Anoop K, University of Calicut, Kerala, India. (anoopk_dcs@uoc.ac.in)
- 2. Deepak P, Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK. (deepaksp@acm.org)
- 3. Lajish V L, University of Calicut, Kerala, India. (lajish@uoc.ac.in)
Related Publication
Anoop K, Deepak P, and Lajish V L. 2020. Emotion Cognizance Improves Health Fake News Identification. In 24th International Database Engineering & Applications Symposium (IDEAS 2020), August 12–14, 2020, Seoul, Republic of Korea. ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 12, 1-10, https://doi.org/10.1145/3410566.3410595.
Abstract: Identifying fake news is increasingly being recognized as an important computational task with high potential social impact. Misinformation is routinely injected into almost every domain of news including politics, health, science, business, etc., among which, the fake news in the health domain poses serious risk and harm to health and well-being in modern societies. In this paper, we consider the utility of the affective character of news articles for fake news identification in the health domain and present evidence that emotion cognizant representations are significantly more suited for the task. We outline a simple technique that works by leveraging emotion intensity lexicons to develop emotion-amplified text representations and evaluate the utility of such a representation for identifying fake news relating to health in various supervised and unsupervised scenarios. The consistent and notable empirical gains that we observe over a range of technique types and parameter settings establish the utility of the emotional information in news articles, an often overlooked aspect, for the task of misinformation identification in the health domain.
