Short Research Paper II
User Preference-aware Fake News Detection
Yingtong Dou1 , Kai Shu2 , Congying Xia1 , Philip S. Yu1 , Lichao Sun3
1 Department
of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
2 Department
of Computer Science, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL, USA
3 Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, USA
{ydou5,cxia8,psyu}@uic.edu,kshu@iit.edu,james.lichao.sun@gmail.com
ABSTRACT
Disinformation and fake news have posed detrimental effects on
individuals and society in recent years, attracting broad attention to
fake news detection. The majority of existing fake news detection
algorithms focus on mining news content and/or the surrounding
exogenous context for discovering deceptive signals; while the en-
dogenous preference of a user when he/she decides to spread a
piece of fake news or not is ignored. The confirmation bias the-
ory has indicated that a user is more likely to spread a piece of
fake news when it confirms his/her existing beliefs/preferences.
Users’ historical, social engagements such as posts provide rich
information about users’ preferences toward news and have great
potentials to advance fake news detection. However, the work on
exploring user preference for fake news detection is somewhat
limited. Therefore, in this paper, we study the novel problem of
exploiting user preference for fake news detection. We propose
a new framework, UPFD, which simultaneously captures various
signals from user preferences by joint content and graph mod-
eling. Experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate
the effectiveness of the proposed framework. We release our code
and data as a benchmark for GNN-based fake news detection:
https://github.com/safe-graph/GNN-FakeNews.
CCS CONCEPTS
• Computing methodologies → Machine learning; • Informa-
tion systems → Social networks.
KEYWORDS
Data Mining; Social Media Analysis; Fake News Detection
ACM Reference Format:
Yingtong Dou1 , Kai Shu2 , Congying Xia1 , Philip S. Yu1 , Lichao Sun3 . 2021.
User Preference-aware Fake News Detection. In Proceedings of the 44th Inter-
national ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information
Retrieval (SIGIR ’21), July 11–15, 2021, Virtual Event, Canada. ACM, New
York, NY, USA, 5 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3404835.3462990
1 INTRODUCTION
In recent years, social media has enabled the wide dissemination
of disinformation and fake news– false or misleading information
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or
classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed
for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation
on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM
must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish,
to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a
fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org.
SIGIR ’21, July 11–15, 2021, Virtual Event, Canada
© 2021 Association for Computing Machinery.
ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-8037-9/21/07. . . $15.00
https://doi.org/10.1145/3404835.3462990
2051
SIGIR ’21, July 11–15, 2021, Virtual Event, Canada
disguised in news articles to mislead consumers [27, 37]. Disin-
formation has resulted in deleterious effects and raised serious
concerns, demanding novel approaches for fake news detection.
Among various fake news detection techniques, fact-checking
is the most straightforward approach; however, it is usually labor-
intensive to acquire evidence from domain experts [9]. In addi-
tion, computational approaches using feature engineering or deep
learning have shown many promising results [3, 12, 23, 31]. For
example, SAFE [36] and FakeBERT [11] used the TextCNN [35] and
BERT [5, 28, 29] to encode the news textual information, respec-
tively; GCNFN [17] and GNN-CL [8] leveraged the GCN [14] to
encode the news propagation patterns on social media (e.g., news
sharing cascading among social media accounts). However, these
methods focus on modeling news content and its user exogenous
context and ignore the user endogenous preferences.
Sociological and psychological studies on journalism have the-
orized the correlation between user preferences and their online
news consumption behaviors [24]. For example, Naíve Realism [22]
indicates that consumers tend to believe that their perceptions of
reality are the only accurate views, while others who disagree are
regarded as uninformed, irrational, or biased; and Confirmation Bias
theory [18] reveals that consumers prefer to receive information
that confirms their existing views. For instance, a user believes the
election fraud would probably share similar news with a supportive
stance, and the news asserting election is stolen would attract users
with similar beliefs [1]. To model user endogenous preferences,
existing works have attempted to utilize historical posts as a proxy
and have shown promising performance to detect sarcasm [13],
hate speech [20], and fake news spreaders [21] on social media.
In this paper, we consider the historical posts of social media
users as their endogenous preference in news consumption. We
propose an end-to-end fake news detection framework named User
Preference-aware Fake Detection (UPFD) to model endogenous
preference and exogenous context jointly (as shown in Figure 1).
Specifically, UPFD consists of the following major components: (1)
To model the user endogenous preference, we encode news content
and user historical posts using various text representation learning
approaches. (2) To obtain the user exogenous context, we build
a tree-structured propagation graph for each news based on its
sharing cascading on social media. The news post is regarded as
the root node, and other nodes represent the users who shared
the same news posts. (3) To integrate the endogenous and exoge-
nous information, we take the vector representations of news and
users as their node features and employ Graph Neural Networks
(GNNs) [7, 17] to learn a joint user engagement embedding. The
user engagement embedding and news textual embedding are used
to train a neural classifier to detect fake news. Our major contribu-
tions can be summarized as follows:
Short Research Paper II
Exogenous Context Encoder
GNN
Social Context Extraction
News Piece
In certain swing states, there
were more votes than people
who voted, and in big numbers. Engaged
Does that not really matter?
Users
User Preference and News Textual Embeddings
Stopping Poll Watchers, voting
for unsuspecting people, fake
ballots and so much more.
News Content Extraction
User Historical Posts Extraction
Endogenous Preference Encoder
Figure 1: The proposed UPFD framework for user preference-aware fake news detection. Given the news piece and its engaged users on social
media, we extract the exogenous context as a news propagation graph and encode the endogenous information based on user historical posts
and news texts. The endogenous and exogenous information are fused using a GNN encoder. The final news embedding, composed of user
engagement embedding and news textual embedding, is fed into the neural classifier to predict the news’ credibility.
• We study a novel problem of user preference-aware fake news
detection on social media;
• We propose a principled way to exploit both endogenous prefer-
ence and exogenous context jointly to detect fake news; and
• We conduct extensive experiments on real-world datasets to
demonstrate the effectiveness of UPFD for detecting fake news.
2 OUR APPROACH
In this section, we present the details of the proposed framework
for fake news detection named UPFD (User Preference-aware Fake
News Detection). As shown in Figure 1, our framework has three
major components. First, given a news piece, we crawl the historical
posts of the users engaged in the news to learn user endogenous
preference. We implicitly extract the preferences of engaged users
by encoding historical posts using text representation learning tech-
niques (e.g., word2vec [16], BERT [5]). The news textual data is
encoded using the same approach. Second, to leverage user exoge-
nous context, we build the news propagation graph according to its
engagement information on social media platforms (e.g., retweets
on Twitter). Third, we devise a hierarchical information fusion pro-
cess to fuse the user endogenous preference and exogenous context.
Specifically, we obtain the user engagement embedding using GNN
as the graph encoder, where the news and user embeddings en-
coded by the text encoder are used as their corresponding node
features in the news propagation graph. The final news embeddings
are composed by the concatenation of user engagement embedding
and news textual embedding.
Next, we will introduce how we encode endogenous preference,
extract the exogenous context, and fuse both information.
2.1 Endogenous Preference Encoding
It is non-trivial to explicitly model the endogenous preference of a
user only using his/her social network information. Similar to [2, 13,
20] which model the users’ personality, sentiment and stance using
their historical posts, we leverage the historical posts of a user to
encode his/her preference implicitly. However, none of the previous
fake news datasets contain such information. In this paper, we select
SIGIR ’21, July 11–15, 2021, Virtual Event, Canada
Layers Readout
}
v1
!"#$%&'$()*#+,-#)%./01%234)56789:;<=><?@ABC"7>DCE01FGGG=H9'I-JKLMN6=OPQ+R%@S.$5L?BT/BS)=:UV7'EIW4N5TOX?Y)EX7%MZQ)/RZ4B@E%>5&.D[/\R]IT5D7&W^R2__-H_/2/I&?`33a68#`$Y[aB`D>3?VK2]VM;UYL_>7Ca'M^^\aT)^RIM[_:Q5L#MCC>W<^:5?`D4`4H7SJ*M8Hb#cTKN?%M&?&N..dab[LVN"X"9;SHJ9E=$O.BYT7*d.6A]<26>Oe>"bbZ-OZ`E=@-b"*-d8'[>9<f27eX?Q;e9cI">$MOa%LIR-f:;NK>MS<M>'`c`&@b>)b@d%7.=-?8)]S6&A]E-XS8aQ=8@ee$"UM4^O/4)NS6A:IKf'X&AP2WTf_4U&Ob??aT[7X4KWLJ8\[T_+?6S_D]?.+IDEDC^@G49@GJ=5GK[9'G=8M=Z='%/d9%VPU\%P3%&HT+ZE$YQ<GVD@EAG&aP]G00!3"#$%&'$F
Loss Function
v2 !"#$%&'$()*#+,-#)%./01$2345"6"78924$53:*;<;=>?@A201B>>>8CD'E-F5GHIJ8<KL+M%NO.$9GPQ:/QO)8;R4S'7ETUI9:<VPW)7VS%HXL)/MXUQN7%Y9&.Z3/6M[E:9ZS&T?M=\\-C\/=/E&P]^^_J`#]$W3_Q]ZY^P45=[4HaRWG\YSb_'H??6_:)?MEH3\;L9G#HbbYTc?;9P]ZU]UCSOF*H`C@#d:5IP%H&P&I..A_@3G4#OJ?Z+b_\^/Q#:;<KH"5`2#^6Jd-?:T??']*_:*c/QE_LGQ_`9>.?^@HS&JN&W*Tc/U?G?I:)7RUN]be">M?"DP"GF\=ZaEaGTa@')*+QV&9@$R-'^6U]3bM$_9M@::#?)"ad@&a@8R#^//MbYJ'[3SAb5AL$aTaX*=b.&:aMSHO9.[bF\;#DYf6&+\Ufe%WdP8LcT>OQK>M.Z>>5RIQIb<7Xac7%EeC73.6`_DO*ef4WN<f%:7^8??K[S00!^"#$%&'$B
User Engagement L
!"#$%&'$()*#+,-#)%./012345678729:;6<=;.>?@@A<B>.C01DCCCEF:'G-HI34JA&K3+8LM?NO'MPEKQEHRST'7.3-"U/OVC2=C/"SW-#=7XBY*9*I6=ZKW5[:6@&3Q=-AN=)$6HC/;IZQPU8\F4G#%Z.:=5*-L+]G.^/LP_R:P)`aEF%$L?[a\Y-YZab.JRc[F/S-b"9ZZ:V'9dbG>@YY]%R::9'4_>d6T*T8;WEb5aK]VE]Y-`#Ke'A7%-T:#<.aK2G9]);?'H%8'OX@BS@2`?;\[S\"cR<_;L6GW6]T+JRb]'P"2OYT]\9\BU'6[)"K"8M.8B=IY+RRc]74>SfIRO_QBP4334%')EZR*f+)T%Y`:9e&dbL2)TSfEJOU%YX9;ESdTX+JdRA[?3/+EYAK3>R\b"]*c9&6PSZQZ[2_5YWQ%RP+>BM%OH&f-Pb*EA/*L6</Ed#GC$>#CVEb:'VH:*B\^2K%LGNKOAKYeF5*]e<6fFC$F%b)C00!`"#$%&'$D
… EU
!"#$%&'$()*#+,-#)%./0123435)/6789:&;<9./=>?@A)?B)01CDDD7?E'F-G73H6I&JKL$E?GMGN+.O-#OP?K-;2Q)'RO&S$)TL=G>UL6-V>LTKORWPNXOS&FG<X/%8X/-UY4ZL5PS/Z2%[[Z\6Q]\-G\YL^")-_9$?&`YHY5?7/B29%aN$P#Pb$]@>>5G[-_V@D@=_L4/?H#;/88>$73a-RBM9/>=\#`/33aJ78J%O`4&SQLGa$T?]%-Z=Q3^&#L9O.7+/RT>D8"#SXKEc^*K_"3*OIB#d\6YIW__"T_JU+VP@L=#4[A7bd=\GaO4.'7-@[$[:+4eQ>S=Tf;S*cP?b)a&+$I/$KU&3Vad.)Y:X?&%#=A<b_I'H]UGeA>QH8>^J)+X`UaV;[:f#S>V'$"-J`"8*4V&OB>I53TZ+UV?E5I#3c%*EV@%9_>W/]\a/`bfRbbVYJIAcOD6STB/*NB2a'XaRXa&-OU/MF6PXb2\M]ZRRQ?<!X"#$%&'$C
vn
!"#$%&'$()*#+,-#)%./01234*56#789$7#:;#$<=>7?@A5B=01CDDDEFA'G-HE5IJ=&3:AKL@MN+OPQ8RS&=$T"UQVT%NW='QJX7:EY.Z:S7+A-L[\]@^)@%K?R+]4R_Q`R[I_V6:::Q$.->G>@=P]UW`a`b\:;.&Y-24\$J)FYANBE@a^V9#533bV[3X`ZP@^#G']<JcSS#I$2K=YD_+XJY<AB;IKHdTQ>JZ&'.[)@T^&TEE);e]-?NH8%%55>;+*>O6/G#:H/Wf"E*\9N65Q$8>M8HE;^)bXbc/75\7:"WPK_2Y[dd)#XRe^Db'>H2KS$<4PS<6RUO\_Z8)925W'Y4<B=)bE.=[L-O-D].dHN:NF\b8=IQN)<TAK'9^fL82?^TX\MF?NZ]/VfJ>%2XOOXN828=H#XW:Y8cGE-4\'H5O)HFFL'A"bL$]))RI>GJ^dG[JbQZ=UF93US^D*/*"b/GB.GK6ab6H'_B<&)B*R6Je\@DI>3R.G0!4"#$%&'$C
1
Embedding
vn !"#$%&'$()*#+,-#)%./0123456789-':;<=>?5@47A9BC<;)01DEEEFGH'I-J3KL6MF9N>+O%PB.$QKRST/SB)FU:VW'XICY6QT9ZR[)XZW%L7>)/O7YSPX%\Q&.]=/^O@ITQ]W&C_O`aa-Ga/`/I&R<bbAM2#<$[=AS<]\bRV3`@VLc:[Ka\WdA'L__^AT)_OIL=aU>QK#Ldd\C4_UQR<]Y<YGWBJ*L2Ge#;T36R%L&R&6..5Ae=KVY_>LKYH^aBXE:'=Fd)aW`^9]88;O'aLSLf)/MaR-@CfMP.7$CY>N'B<;UELdP5GLBaPLSABS-QQ43\U.eRF'?J+T'&-aG/fPSANZC[_=E$45:8HZ/[^%MGH&-e6&Z#L:LBTI\_II:RHZ].PFUY5RV[;99X<IBR'P)P-94`5IF)Qa&@4fJ#)O++Hb)J#4<@J?\NEIK4E_EB'FN2&EEY?ERE>VXE?][]T%]Q8]R^Z./%;>ebEQ<4IVHX.VMW00!b"#$%&'$D
News Embedding
Neural
+ Classifier
t1
!"#$%&'$()*#+,-#)%./0123456-789:;%<:=>?6@A#*=-4@B01C===DEF';-GD3HI3=JKLM9+2N2*.OPP#Q:RSM<SOTP&/9U=OVWO")3XLH?H-)YVWHX'7I%T6&.ZN&.PO&UX#[9WI\6ZN37]7^H5WB.P9_Y>T`;U$E:E*-U$)Na]B26RX@Yb&2&"))"96ZD$<B5<<^VM]KZ/c>3=V8EBHYZEc_%%P#'T[O/`Y*_8<6HVHQM-<H:/2]?K$GDXA5AL7FSa^Jd@8T;`W6R#NX7\b:&DMdH4L:%A.Q_84+Q'-R93<e]MIV>O=<E+>2#7H3cdLacbJP2B&K\\$-Q)"QNYU<@;'4#<Y4?V`'U5&.;NJN9Rf'%a3cW'M:;)AA'IKMJV?KN6;dTKV?"T3P53eQL894>\95@Qb87NDAe+/cEF93Z.2R]NG5/?beVB*c;=.F/7J+3a=%>$=QD*3/*"f/;UPc&F"Le:#$DH%_a4MN;]RN===3`^40!N"#$%&'$C
…
Text tn
!"#$%&'$()*#+,-#)%./0123$4%56789:;<=>?@ABCBD+EFGH01I666JKL'<-CJMNOM6HGP=3+Q2Q*.@RR#STU9=V9@WR&/376@:D@")MBPNXN-)?:DNB'YO%WZ&.[2&.R@&7B#\3DOAZ[2MY5Y]NED8.R3^?_W`<7$KTK*-7$)2a58QZUB>?4&Q&"))"3Z[J$V8EVV]:=5G[/b_M6:;K8N?[Kb^%%R#'W\@/`?*^;VZN:NS=-VNT/Q5?Y7Q\PRW3-;R;ZL'U#DSa4Q5O"c2ARY>/\Q4TY->d5cJd.Y#J4MOC[Qb*'%=?%'9@F&CMaRAX&-bX)'WCee;`R=$*fN*2TK9#A?YM6T)4>V&-W#@[^'^+>)&]dHX:49=[fRRVfHQS<4;2`)4S)>4FQ;""A"*-FC)?5C"#JaFAL'3Z.B?c3P_LcL<*PQ"<4[b=eDXa9cROa6#Ab6d?f\J\8;O8F[Oa-ZX/38KZO]f\TddbY9^aGO2LR.dY800!2"#$%&'$I
Representation
News Textual
y !"#$%&'$()*#+,-#)%./0123456789:;#:<.=>42?7@)6'A:B01CAAA=.D'B-E=FGHIAJIK'?LMD.$NO;3P&;?Q8Q2%'?/HR=STUMV$"W*@XXX<K#YMZ[QMNOX\HLQ)HLTYBQAB?D]OI^K)]T<6DIMI7/_7[GT?$[:F]\_*VX$`VX]HQN&.+V<a\*'2:'+*+A\b;BM6$a/KAG\5Z;QNA&X=Hcdc[`+=bN))N6^DQ;KZQ%BU<FE#.7X-E[7`'+$ae^W7&B"5=Nc+LL#)K'?6#QG;cS5X_`b)R[25E/S]U$F;OF8#S3%6Z@e<5f\NXIdFGbLGc5Uc8&)\:Ff8@db.R2J37OAb)<2GF8WY_cdJd7e@#Hc\[BIT6='E-OAbGZS&c<`LGAE[M3cU)QS&&%^$*M.QQc]RVT/fKd4J\#VV7K6DF9#$Df$Vef6S/UEc/=aH@QZfK2MZ:c=3Wc_]WT]FXDb&KeX4;:`P^T:4/AL[]=&2M3S)0!d"#$%&'$C
Learning Models ET FC
!"#$%&'$()*#+,-#)%./01234%5/67$89/:+;5-<=>?-&@A/)01BCCCDEF'3-GDHIJ=&K@L$FEGMG<+.N-#NOE@-K;8PQRD?SG>TU'P-2$VT-U45P#K)>QK%V9*/ARW/AHM?-R%XYTZ[7\>H=;=V';]<&]P>]3U[^$-L<][_$UW>37*`abEO#@5ST$$K36".CW#`=87-**"c%E['cCS/ET-<\ZdVa"["eQT$=/\O7M[&?NKbL:'OPE8RO6+^WG'\\;G_C-QcV@&`4KWdPa/#bNQ@4'S=/GbYV\R[&5M&=S&Jc'ZHK5+b<92/<a\PN*&QE#%U3MRSJ'Sb:KO"I&'8`7AaO;bI%*?:$baN26@FV`dZdM)]@Yd&`f-'&:DD"SVN*N=b`R?E[b::'%KdIdDQdH.9fCTY<4&Hf[-XYF.Z<bY+e]WG3&>Y"32$]5?Qd\C3U)[;#LbCCdI*;TIeZCfVZc24^ZG^Wd.PYT`]]de:a_CMRJ;$H?E6!>"#$%&'$B
Embedding News Label
the FakeNewsNet dataset [25] which contains news content and its
social engagement information on Twitter. Then we use the Twitter
Developer API [4] to crawl historical tweets of all accounts that
retweeted the news in FakeNewsNet.
To obtain rich historical information for user preference model-
ing, we crawl the recent two hundred tweets for each account, so
as to near 20 million tweets being crawled in total. For inaccessible
users whose accounts are suspended or deleted, we use randomly
sampled tweets from accessible users engaging the same news as
its corresponding historical posts. Because deleting the inaccessible
users will break the intact news propagation cascading and results
in a less effective exogenous context encoder. We also remove the
special characters, e.g., “@” characters and URLs, before applying
text representation learning methods.
To encode the news textual information and user preferences, we
employ two types of text representation learning approaches based
on language pretraining. Instead of training on the local corpus,
the word embeddings pretrained on a large corpus are supposed
to encode more semantic similarities between different words and
sentences. For pretrained word2vec vectors, we choose the 680k
300-dimensional vectors pretrained by spaCy [10]. We also employ
pretrained BERT embeddings to encode the historical tweets and
news content as a sequence [5] using bert-as-a-service [32].
Next, we elaborate the details of applying the above text rep-
resentation learning models. spaCy includes pretrained vectors
for 680k words, and we average the vectors of existing words in
combined recent 200 tweets to get user preference representation.
The news textual embedding is obtained similarly. For the BERT
model, we use the cased BERT-Large model to encode the news and
user information. The news content is encoded using BERT with
maximum input sequence length (i.e., 512 tokens). Due to BERT’s
input sequence length limitation, we could not use BERT to encode
200 tweets as one sequence, so we resort to encode each tweet sep-
arately and average them afterward to obtain a user’s preference
representation. Generally, the tweet text is way shorter than the
news text, we empirically set the max input sequence length of
BERT as 16 tokens to accelerate the tweets encoding time.
2052
Short Research Paper II
2.2 Exogenous Context Extraction
Given a news piece on social media, the user exogenous context is
composed of all users that engaged with the news. We utilize the
retweet information of news pieces to build a news propagation
graph. As the toy example of the news propagation graph shown in
Figure 1, it is a tree-structured graph where the root node represents
the news piece, and other nodes represent users who share the
root news. In this paper, we investigate the fake news propagation
on Twitter as a proof-of-concept use case. To build propagation
networks in Twitter, we follow a similar strategy used in [8, 17, 26].
Specifically, we define a new piece as v 1 , and {v 2 , . . . , vn } as a list
of users that retweeted v 1 ordered by time. We define two following
rules to determine the news propagation path:
• For any account vi , if vi retweets the same news later than at least
one following accounts in {v 1 , . . . , vn }, we estimate the news
spreads from the account with the latest timestamp to account vi .
Since the latest tweets are first presented in the timeline of the
Twitter app, and thus have higher probabilities to be retweeted.
• If account vi does not follow any accounts in the retweet se-
quences including the source account, we conservatively esti-
mate the news spreads from the accounts with the most number
of followers. Because tweets from accounts with more follow-
ers have a higher chance to be viewed/retweeted by other users
according to the Twitter content distributing rules.
Based on the above rules, we can build the news propagation graphs
on Twitter. Note that this approach can be applied to other social
media platforms like Facebook as well.
2.3 Information Fusion
Previous works [8, 15, 17] have demonstrated that fusing the user
features with a news propagation graph could boost the fake news
detection performance. Since the GNN can encode both node fea-
ture and graph structure in an end-to-end manner, it is a good fit for
our task. Specifically, we propose a hierarchical information fusion
approach. We first fuse the endogenous and exogenous information
using the GNN. With a GNN, the news textual embedding and
user preference embedding can be taken as node features. Given
the news propagation graph, most GNNs aggregate the features
of its adjacent nodes to learn the embedding of a node. Like pre-
vious GNN-based graph classification models [33, 34], we apply a
readout function over all node embeddings to obtain the embed-
ding of a news propagation graph. The readout function makes
the mean pooling operation over all node embeddings to get the
graph embedding (i.e., user engagement embedding). Second, since
the news content usually contains more explicit signals regarding
the news’ credibility [3]. We fuse the news textual embedding and
user engagement embedding by concatenation as the ultimate news
embedding to enrich the news embedding information.
The fused news embedding is finally fed into a two-layer Multi-
layer Perceptron (MLP) with two output neurons representing the
predicted probabilities for fake and real news. The model is trained
using a binary cross-entropy loss function and is updated with SGD.
3 EXPERIMENTS
In the experiments, we want to address two following questions:
RQ1: How are the performances of the proposed UPFD framework
2053
SIGIR ’21, July 11–15, 2021, Virtual Event, Canada
Table 1: Dataset and graph statistics.
#Graphs #Total #Total #Avg. Nodes
Dataset
(#Fake) Nodes Edges per Graph
314
Politifact (POL) 41,054 40,740 131
(157)
5464
Gossipcop (GOS)
(2732)
314,262 308,798 58
compared to previous works? RQ2: What are the contributions
of endogenous/exogenous information and other variants of the
proposed framework?
3.1 Experimental Setup
3.1.1 Dataset. Previous works have proposed a couple of fake
news datasets with news pieces from different websites and their
fact-checking information [19, 30]. To investigate both the user pref-
erence and propagation pattern of fake news, we choose the Fake-
NewsNet dataset [25]. It contains fake and real news information
from two fact-checking websites and the related social engagement
from Twitter. The dataset statistics are shown in Table 1.
3.1.2 Baselines. We compare the UPFD with fake news detection
models that utilize different information. Many baseline methods
leverage extra information like image information which is not
included in the FakeNewsNet [25]. To ensure a fair comparison, we
implement the baselines only with the parts for encoding the news
content, user comments, and news propagation graph. CSI [23]
employs an LSTM to encode the news content information to detect
fake news. SAFE [36] uses the TextCNN [35] to encode the news
textual information. GCNFN [17] is the first fake news detection
framework to encode the news propagation graph using GCN [14].
It takes the profile information and comment textual embeddings as
the user feature. GNN-CL [8] encodes the news propagation graph
using DiffPool [34], a GNN designed for graph classification. The
node features are extracted from user profile attributes on Twitter.
The list of ten profile feature names can be found in [8, 15] We
also add two baselines that apply MLP directly on news textual
embeddings encoded by word2vec and BERT.
3.1.3 Experimental Settings. We implement all models using Py-
Torch, and all GNN models are implemented with PyTorch-Geometric
package [6]. We use unified graph embedding size (128), batch size
(128), optimizer (Adam), and L2 regularization weight (0.001), train-
val-test split (20%-10%-70%) for all models. The experimental results
are averaged over five different runnings. Other hyper-parameters
for each model are reported with the code.
3.2 RQ1: Performance Evaluation
Table 2 shows the fake news detection performance of UPFD and six
baselines. First, we can observe that UPFD has the best performance
comparing to all baselines. UPFD outperforms the best baseline
GCNFN around 1% on both datasets with statistical significance.
The experimental results of UPFD and GCNFN demonstrate that
the user comments (used by GCNFN) are also beneficial to fake
news detection; and the user endogenous preference could impose
additional information when user comment information is limited.
Short Research Paper II SIGIR ’21, July 11–15, 2021, Virtual Event, Canada

Politifact Gossipcop
Table 2: The fake news detection performance of baselines 0.86
0.96
ACC ACC
and our model. Stars denote statistically significant under 0.84
F1
0.94
F1

the t-test (∗ p ≤ 0.05, ∗ ∗ p ≤ 0.01, ∗ ∗ ∗ p ≤ 0.001).

0.82 0.92

Value

Value
0.80
0.90
0.78
0.88
0.76
POL GOS 0.86
Model 0.74

ACC F1 ACC F1 0.72 0.84

-END & -EXO -END -EXO UPFD -END & -EXO -END -EXO UPFD
SAFE [36] 73.30 72.87 77.37 77.19
News CSI [23] 76.02 75.99 75.20 75.01
Figure 2: The fake news detection performance of differ-
Only BERT+MLP 71.04 71.03 85.76 85.75
word2vec+MLP 76.47 76.36 84.61 84.59 ent variants of UPFD framework. -END/-EXO represents the
GNN-CL [8] 62.90 62.25 95.11 95.09 UPFD variant without endogenous/exogenous information.
News +
GCNFN [17] 83.16 83.56 96.38 96.36
User
UPFD (ours) 84.62∗ 84.65∗ 97.23∗∗ 97.22∗∗∗
Specifically, we employ the GCNFN (word2vec) as the graph
(text) encoder for both datasets, and remove news concatenation
Second, since all baselines either encode the news content or user
to ensure a fair comparison. The UPFD variant without exogenous
comments without considering the historical posts, we can tell
information (-EXO) is implemented by removing all edges in the
that leveraging the historical posts as user endogenous preferences
news propagation graph. Thus, -EXO encodes the news embedding
could improve the fake news detection performance. Note that the
solely based on node features without exchanging information be-
UPFD with the best performance on the both datasets uses BERT
tween nodes. The UPFD variant without endogenous information
as the text encoder and GraphSAGE as the graph encoder.
(-END) takes the user profile as node features and does not contain
user endogenous preference information. The UPFD variant with-
Table 3: Fake news detection performance on two datasets
out both endogenous and exogenous information (-END & -EXO)
with different node feature types and models. The bold (un-
replaces the node features of the -EXO with user profile features.
derlined) text indicates the best (second best) performances
Figure 2 shows the fake news detection performance for dif-
on each dataset.
ferent UPFD variants on two datasets. We can find that remov-
ing either component from the UPFD will reduce its performance.
POL GOS
Feature GraphSAGE GCNFN GraphSAGE GCNFN
Moreover, jointly encoding the endogenous and exogenous infor-
ACC F1 ACC F1 ACC F1 ACC F1 mation attains the best performance. The accuracy of UPFD/-EXO
Profile 77.38 77.12 76.94 76.72 92.19 92.16 89.00 88.96 is 85.61%/81.63%, and the F1 score of UPFD/-EXO is 85.97%/81.15%
word2vec 80.54 80.41 80.54 80.41 96.81 96.80 94.97 94.95 on Politifact. The accuracy of UPFD/-EXO is 95.47%/93.92%, and
BERT 84.62 84.53 83.26 83.14 97.23 97.22 96.18 96.17 the F1 score of UPFD/-EXO is 95.46%/93.81% on Politifact. All the
experimental results are statistically significant under the t-test
(p ≤ 0.01). This indicates that exogenous information (i.e., news
3.3 RQ2: Ablation Study propagation graph) is more informative on Politifact since removing
3.3.1 Encoder Variants. As we mentioned in Section 2.3, we em- it results in a larger performance drop. It is obvious that endogenous
ploy different text encoders and GNNs to encode the endogenous information contributes more to performance gain than exogenous
and exogenous information. In Table 3, we show the fake news information. This observation further verifies the necessity of mod-
detection performance of two GNN variants using three different eling user endogenous preferences.
node features. Note that “word2vec” and “BERT” represent features
encoding the user endogenous preferences while the “Profile” fea- 4 CONCLUSION
ture is regarded as a baseline. GraphSAGE [7] is a GNN to learn In this paper, we argues that user endogenous news consumption
node embeddings via aggregating neighbor nodes information and preference plays a vital role in the fake news detection problem.
GCNFN [17] is a GNN-based fake news detection model which To verify this argument, we collect the user historical posts to im-
leverages two GCN layers to encode the news propagation graph. plicitly model the user endogenous preference and leverage the
Table 3 shows that the endogenous features (word2vec and BERT) news propagation graph on social media as the exogenous social
are consistently better than the profile feature, which only encodes context of users. An end-to-end fake news detection framework
the user profile information. We also observe that GraphSAGE and named UPFD is proposed to fuse the endogenous and exogenous
BERT have the average best performance among other model and information and predict the news’ credibility on social media. Ex-
feature variants. It suggests that BERT is better than word2vec perimental results demonstrate the advantage of modeling the user
for encoding textual features which has been verified on other endogenous preference.
NLP tasks [5]. Note that the BERT performance could be further
improved via fine-tuning, and we leave it as future work. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
3.3.2 Framework Variants. To verify the effectiveness of endoge- This work is supported in part by NSF under grants III-1763325,
nous preference and exogenous context, we fix the text and graph III-1909323, and SaTC-1930941. Kai Shu is supported by the John S.
encoder and design three UPFD variants that remove the endoge- and James L. Knight Foundation through a grant to the Institute for
nous information, exogenous information or both of them. Data, Democracy & Politics at The George Washington University.

2054
Short Research Paper II
REFERENCES
[1] Anton Abilov, Yiqing Hua, Hana Matatov, Ofra Amir, and Mor Naaman. 2021.
VoterFraud2020: a Multi-modal Dataset of Election Fraud Claims on Twitter.
arXiv preprint arXiv:2101.08210 (2021).
[2] Nadeem Ahmad and Jawaid Siddique. 2017. Personality assessment using Twitter
tweets. Procedia computer science 112 (2017), 1964–1973.
[3] Shantanu Chandra, Pushkar Mishra, Helen Yannakoudakis, and Ekaterina
Shutova. 2020. Graph-based Modeling of Online Communities for Fake News
Detection. arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.06274 (2020).
[4] Twitter Developer. 2021. Twitter API. https://developer.twitter.com/.
[5] Jacob Devlin, Ming-Wei Chang, Kenton Lee, and Kristina Toutanova. 2018. Bert:
Pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding. arXiv
preprint arXiv:1810.04805 (2018).
[6] Matthias Fey and Jan E. Lenssen. 2019. Fast Graph Representation Learning with
PyTorch Geometric. In ICLR Workshop on Representation Learning on Graphs and
Manifolds.
[7] William L Hamilton, Rex Ying, and Jure Leskovec. 2017. Inductive representation
learning on large graphs. In NeurIPS.
[8] Yi Han, Shanika Karunasekera, and Christopher Leckie. 2020. Graph Neural
Networks with Continual Learning for Fake News Detection from Social Media.
arXiv preprint arXiv:2007.03316 (2020).
[9] Naeemul Hassan, Gensheng Zhang, Fatma Arslan, Josue Caraballo, Damian
Jimenez, Siddhant Gawsane, Shohedul Hasan, Minumol Joseph, Aaditya Kulkarni,
Anil Kumar Nayak, et al. 2017. ClaimBuster: the first-ever end-to-end fact-
checking system. VLDB (2017).
[10] Matthew Honnibal and Ines Montani. 2017. spacy 2: Natural language understand-
ing with bloom embeddings, convolutional neural networks and incremental
parsing. To appear 7, 1 (2017).
[11] Rohit Kumar Kaliyar, Anurag Goswami, and Pratik Narang. [n.d.]. FakeBERT:
Fake news detection in social media with a BERT-based deep learning approach.
Multimedia Tools and Applications ([n. d.]), 1–24.
[12] Hamid Karimi, Proteek Roy, Sari Saba-Sadiya, and Jiliang Tang. 2018. Multi-
Source Multi-Class Fake News Detection. In COLING.
[13] Anupam Khattri, Aditya Joshi, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, and Mark Carman. 2015.
Your sentiment precedes you: Using an authorâĂŹs historical tweets to pre-
dict sarcasm. In Proceedings of the 6th workshop on computational approaches to
subjectivity, sentiment and social media analysis. 25–30.
[14] Thomas N Kipf and Max Welling. 2017. Semi-supervised classification with graph
convolutional networks. In ICLR.
[15] Yi-Ju Lu and Cheng-Te Li. 2020. GCAN: Graph-aware Co-Attention Networks
for Explainable Fake News Detection on Social Media. In Proceedings of the 58th
Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
[16] Tomas Mikolov, Kai Chen, Greg Corrado, and Jeffrey Dean. 2013. Efficient
estimation of word representations in vector space. arXiv preprint arXiv:1301.3781
(2013).
[17] Federico Monti, Fabrizio Frasca, Davide Eynard, Damon Mannion, and Michael M
Bronstein. 2019. Fake news detection on social media using geometric deep
learning. ICLR Workshop (2019).
[18] Raymond S Nickerson. 1998. Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomenon in
many guises. Review of general psychology 2, 2 (1998), 175.
[19] Martin Potthast, Johannes Kiesel, Kevin Reinartz, Janek Bevendorff, and Benno
Stein. 2018. BuzzFeed-Webis Fake News Corpus 2016. https://doi.org/10.5281/
2055
SIGIR ’21, July 11–15, 2021, Virtual Event, Canada
zenodo.1239675
[20] Jing Qian, Mai ElSherief, Elizabeth M Belding, and William Yang Wang. 2018.
Leveraging intra-user and inter-user representation learning for automated hate
speech detection. arXiv preprint arXiv:1804.03124 (2018).
[21] Francisco Rangel, Anastasia Giachanou, Bilal Ghanem, and Paolo Rosso. 2020.
Overview of the 8th Author Profiling Task at PAN 2020: Profiling Fake News
Spreaders on Twitter. In CLEF.
[22] Lee Ross and Andrew Ward. 1995. Naive realism in everyday life: Implications
for social conflict and misunderstanding. (1995).
[23] Natali Ruchansky, Sungyong Seo, and Yan Liu. 2017. Csi: A hybrid deep model
for fake news detection. In CIKM.
[24] Kai Shu, H Russell Bernard, and Huan Liu. 2019. Studying fake news via net-
work analysis: detection and mitigation. In Emerging Research Challenges and
Opportunities in Computational Social Network Analysis and Mining. Springer,
43–65.
[25] Kai Shu, Deepak Mahudeswaran, Suhang Wang, Dongwon Lee, and Huan Liu.
2020. Fakenewsnet: A data repository with news content, social context, and
spatiotemporal information for studying fake news on social media. Big Data 8,
3 (2020), 171–188.
[26] Kai Shu, Deepak Mahudeswaran, Suhang Wang, and Huan Liu. 2020. Hierarchical
propagation networks for fake news detection: Investigation and exploitation. In
Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media.
[27] Kai Shu, Amy Sliva, Suhang Wang, Jiliang Tang, and Huan Liu. 2017. Fake
News Detection on Social Media: A Data Mining Perspective. KDD exploration
newsletter (2017).
[28] Lichao Sun, Kazuma Hashimoto, Wenpeng Yin, Akari Asai, Jia Li, Philip Yu, and
Caiming Xiong. 2020. Adv-BERT: BERT is not robust on misspellings! Generating
nature adversarial samples on BERT. arXiv preprint arXiv:2003.04985 (2020).
[29] Lichao Sun, Congying Xia, Wenpeng Yin, Tingting Liang, Philip S Yu, and Lifang
He. 2020. Mixup-Transfomer: Dynamic Data Augmentation for NLP Tasks. arXiv
preprint arXiv:2010.02394 (2020).
[30] William Yang Wang. 2017. " Liar, Liar Pants on Fire": A New Benchmark Dataset
for Fake News Detection. arXiv preprint arXiv:1705.00648 (2017).
[31] Yaqing Wang, Fenglong Ma, Zhiwei Jin, Ye Yuan, Guangxu Xun, Kishlay Jha, Lu
Su, and Jing Gao. 2018. EANN: Event Adversarial Neural Networks for Multi-
Modal Fake News Detection. In KDD.
[32] Han Xiao. 2018. bert-as-service. https://github.com/hanxiao/bert-as-service.
[33] Keyulu Xu, Weihua Hu, Jure Leskovec, and Stefanie Jegelka. 2018. How powerful
are graph neural networks? arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.00826 (2018).
[34] Zhitao Ying, Jiaxuan You, Christopher Morris, Xiang Ren, Will Hamilton, and Jure
Leskovec. 2018. Hierarchical graph representation learning with differentiable
pooling. In Advances in neural information processing systems.
[35] Ye Zhang and Byron Wallace. 2015. A sensitivity analysis of (and practitioners’
guide to) convolutional neural networks for sentence classification. arXiv preprint
arXiv:1510.03820 (2015).
[36] Xinyi Zhou, Jindi Wu, and Reza Zafarani. 2020. SAFE: Similarity-Aware Multi-
modal Fake News Detection. In Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery
and Data Mining. Springer, 354–367.
[37] Xinyi Zhou and Reza Zafarani. 2020. A survey of fake news: Fundamental
theories, detection methods, and opportunities. ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)
53, 5 (2020), 1–40.