Exploring Author Profiling for Fake News Detection

The proliferation of online media allows for the rapid dissemination of unmoderated news, unfortunately including fake news. The extensive spread of fake news poses a potent threat to both individuals and society. This paper focuses on designing author profiles to detect authors who are primarily engaged in publishing fake news articles. We build on the hypothesis that authors who write fake news repeatedly write only fake news articles, at least in short-term periods. Fake news authors have a distinct writing style compared to real news authors, who naturally want to maintain trustworthiness. We explore the potential to detect fake news authors by designing authors’ profiles based on writing style, sentiment, and co-authorship patterns. We evaluate our approach using a publicly available dataset with over 5000 authors and 20000 articles. For our evaluation, we build and compare different classes of supervised machine learning models. We find that the K-NN model performed the best, and it could detect authors who are prone to writing fake news with an 83% true positive rate with only a 5% false positive rate.