From anomaly detection to rumour detection using data streams of social platforms

Social platforms became a major source of rumours. While rumours can have severe real-world implications, their detection is notoriously hard: Content on social platforms is short and lacks semantics; it spreads quickly through a dynamically evolving network; and without considering the context of content, it may be impossible to arrive at a truthful interpretation. Traditional approaches to rumour detection, however, exploit solely a single content modality, e.g., social media posts, which limits their detection accuracy. In this paper, we cope with the aforementioned challenges by means of a multi-modal approach to rumour detection that identifies anomalies in both, the entities (e.g., users, posts, and hashtags) of a social platform and their relations. Based on local anomalies, we show how to detect rumours at the network level, following a graph-based scan approach. In addition, we propose incremental methods, which enable us to detect rumours using streaming data of social platforms. We illustrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach with a real-world dataset of 4M tweets with more than 1000 rumours.