This paper is submitted at Dalhousie University for Technology Innovation course as a deliverable. This paper focuses on the opportunities, challenges and methods for Fake news.

1. Detailed Research on Fake News: Opportunities,
Challenges and Methods
Milap Bhanderi
Faculty of Computer Science
Dalhousie University
Halifax, Canada
milap@dal.ca
Abstract—The tenacity of this paper is to explain the effects
of fake news in society with the help of diverse research work.
This paper will provide a different understanding and the
definition of fake news. Moreover, the paper will shed light upon
the opportunities of fake news such as what are the sources
and influencing factors for the misinformation and challenges
created by the fake news among the individual in terms of the
identification of the trustworthiness of the information. Several
researchers came up with the ideas to mitigate the impact of
the fake news which can be seen in the later section of the
paper and I will also discuss what are the short-come of these
solutions. Overall, this paper will comprise the various research
work accomplished in the domain of fake news and what is the
effect of the fake news in the whole society and on an individual,
some of the methods to reduce the spreading of the fake news
and what are the factors and characteristics through which the
identification of fake news is possible.
Index Terms—Fake news, misinformation, truthfulness, social
media, detection, challenges, analysis
I. INTRODUCTION
Fake news can be defined as false information or propa-
ganda published under the pretence of being genuine news in
an attempt to mislead readers of the content and spread mis-
information via social networks and word-of-mouth. In other
words, Fake news is made-up stuff, masterfully manipulated
with the purpose to deceive in order to harm the reputation
of an organization or a person by the usage of sensationalist,
false, or completely fabricated headlines to increase readership
[1][2].
The proliferation of Fake news can be possible as there are
myriads of mediums through which the news can be spread
easily or it can go viral. Traditional media like Newspaper
and Television, these can be one of the media from where the
fake news can be broadcasted. There are many news channels
which show only that news which can help them to earn more
money. They are no longer interested in the validation of the
news, they just seek for the source of the news from which
they can make some money. This news channels influence the
people and because of word-of-mouth at the end, people start
believing it as it is coming from their near ones.
The other medium is social media which is one of the fastest
media for proliferation of the fake news where anything can
go viral within minutes. This can be used for good causes
where people can be made aware of something very quickly
and also harm someone’s reputation. People can post anything
and like-minded people will share it across multiple social
media platforms and this way a single post takes a shape of
viral news. This viral news has no such source which one can
verify and authenticate the truthfulness of the news. This way
the news from social media can also be helpful to give the
benefit to the people and it can be also critical for them.
The identification of the source of any news is very impor-
tant for the reader as an article, video, social media post or any
kind of news affects the reader emotionally and mentally. The
research on the detection and prevention of the fake news is
carried out and there are many solutions came up in terms of
algorithmic software where one can identify the source of the
news, the truthfulness of the news and so on. These software
and different models help to obstruct the aggrandize of the
fake news.
The remaining of the paper will describe the different
research work done in the field of mitigation of the fake
news using the different approaches and what is the outcome
from it and also what kind of challenges which needs to
be addressed yet. Moreover, we will also see what are the
problems and opportunities for fake news. In Section III, we
will see the related work which can be done with the help of
the outcomes from the research work done in this field and it
will be followed by the final concluding remarks in Section
IV.
A. Motivation
The fake news is one of the sensitive topics which can be
good or harmful for the people based on how it is described.
The proliferation of fake news is increased in several years
because of the advancement of technology where one can
easily create and share a piece of information across the world.
There are very few resources available through which we can
easily verify the accuracy of any news.
B. Objective
The main aspiration behind this research is to identify the
sources from where the fake news is generated. Also, reduce
the propagation of fake news among people from different
sources and make them aware of the mediums from which
they can be affected. This research will shed some light on
the causes of fake news and its effects on the readers’ mental

2. condition. Moreover, will see some of the solutions which help
to distinguish the news and how it can be prevented.
II. LITERATURE REVIEW
In this section, I will discuss some research work done on
the fake news regarding its causes and effects and will see
some of the proposed solutions to detect the fake news across
different media.
A. Fake News: A Survey of Research, Detection Methods, and
Opportunities
The Fake News is not the new term which just came
into being recently but why it is trending so much? The
reason behind this inflation of fake news is because of online
resources which makes the production and sharing of fake
news much faster than traditional news media. According
to reports from August 2017, around two-thirds people of
America get the news from the social media. As social media
reduce the physical distance between the people across the
world, it is easy to share, forward, vote, review and to inspire
others to participate in the exchange of the news with the
help of the global and easily available platforms. This kind of
online news can lead to grave repercussions, yet additionally
considerable potential political and financial advantages. Such
benevolent advantages make malevolent substances to make,
publish and distribute fake news [3].
The research tells that when there are massive political
parties and the dominating business tycoons behind the gen-
eration of the fake news, there is a greater motivation to
make fake news more powerful and indistinguishable from
truth to the public. There is some research which proves
that humans are vulnerable while discriminating truth and
prevarication when it is represented with illusory information.
Psychological research carried out on 1000 participants over
100 experiments depict that human’s accuracy of detecting
deception is very low and the accurate rates are in the range
of 55-58 percentage. In addition to that, when anyone hears the
news frequently, they are more likely to start believing it as the
fake news can effortlessly get the legitimacy and objectivity
of a representative [3].
Fig. 1. A Comparison between Concepts related to Fake News
The researchers also tried to propose two different defini-
tions for fake news. (i) Broad definition:”where news broadly
includes claims, statements, speeches, posts, among other
types of information related to public figures and organi-
zations. It emphasizes information authenticity, purposefully
adopts a broad definition for the term news and weakens
the requirement for information intentions. This definition
supports most existing fake-news-related studies, and datasets,
as provided by the existing fact-checking websites.” (ii) Nar-
row Definition: ”This narrow definition addresses the publics
perception of fake news. The narrow definition emphasizes
both news authenticity and intentions; it also ensures the
posted information is news by investigating its publisher. This
definition supports recent advancements in fake news studies”
[3].
According to this research, the study of the fake news can
be classified into four perspectives where each perspective
focuses on some characteristics of the fake news based on
the information and by implementing different methods.
1) Knowledge-based Study of Fake News: In this study, the
fake news can be analysed or detected using the method of
fact-checking which is helpful to identify the authenticity of
the news by comparing it with true facts [3].
2) Style-based Study of Fake News: This study highlights
on investigating the content of the news, however, the main
aim is to evaluate news intention that how it can mislead the
people [3].
3) Propagation-based Study of Fake News: This study
shows how someone can take benefit of the information related
to the propagation of fake news or how it propagates and users
spreading it [3].
4) Credibility-based Study of Fake News: In this study,
the relationship between news, publishers, users and posts
can be identified. Let say, someone published an article on
some website and many users forwarded that than it is more
likely to be fake news as compared to the article posted on
some authenticate websites. This study is overlapping with the
Propagation-based study [3].
The complete summary and comparison of perspectives to
study Fake News can be seen in Figure 2 below.
Fig. 2. Summary and Comparison of Perspectives to study Fake News

3. B. The Fake News Game: Actively Inoculating Against the
Risk of Misinformation
This research is performed based on the Inoculation theory.
The inoculation process contains two components which are
threat and refutational preemption. The ”threat” is motivational
and it refers to the identification of someone’s attitude on a
specific issue. On the other hand, the refutational preemption is
focused on providing people with some arguments to resist the
persuasion. In this research, the researcher provided news to a
focus group who educate people regarding the misinformation
[4].
In this pilot study, the players need to engage themselves
and try to create goals and motivation which shows an
individual’s characteristics. So, the ultimate goal is to have
four characters where they have 1) The ”Denier” who will
look at the topic as small and insignificant. 2) The ”Alarmist”
who contradicts of the first one and will see the news as
the bigger problem as possible. 3) The ”Clickbait Monger”
whose aim is to get as many clicks as possible and 4)
The ”Conspiracy theorist” who will disturb the mainstream
medium and influence the audience to follow it. Though the
counter-arguments are one of the important parts of the study,
researchers have already provided it to the players. In the end,
they found that this process of inoculation caused on base of
fake news game decreased the observed reliability and control
of fake news articles. Moreover, they emphasize the nature of
this study and how they recognize the different interpretation
of different roles to generate fake news [4].
C. The Current State of Fake News: Challenges and Oppor-
tunities
The authenticity of the information became one of the
vital issues which affect different industries like business and
society. The proposed solution for this problem consists of two
approaches which are 1) Human intervention where humans
will check the fact within the information and verify it. 2) The
algorithm is used to detect the fake content and the sources
from which the information is shared or originated. These
algorithms are divided based on their functionalities [5].
During the hackathon competition at Princeton University,
students developed a browser extension which verifies the
content and provides feedback on whether the content is true
or not. This extension work based on the algorithm which
basically compare the content by comparing it on Google or
Bing and tell the user about the highly trusted sources. This
algorithm also helps the user while surfing through different
social media platform like Facebook where while scrolling
through the news feed, it will identify the post and informs
you about its truthfulness. Moreover, when user post or share
anything, it will do backend processing using AI algorithms,
word extraction etc and tries to authenticate the post and if
it contains the unverified information, then it will notify the
user and user can decide the further actions like to down it or
keep it [5].
However, the main challenge for this algorithm is to detec-
tion and verification of facts. The facts are basically something
which happened on a specific time, somewhere and with
someone. There are many scenarios where validation of the
facts is not possible. Let say, many people used to report
something like ”Today is a sunny day”, ”I can’t understand
what she’s saying” etc. which is hard to compare and in that
case, the algorithm will perform its fundamental operation and
provide details accordingly [5].
D. Trends in the Diffusion of Misinformation on Social Media
As the usage of social media increased, the buildup of the
fake news fosters. In response to this matter, social media
platforms decide to limit actions to reduce the proliferation of
misinformation. The most identical social media sources are
Facebook and Twitter. Though, after the 2016 US election,
Facebook has improved its authenticity of the content and
made a significant impact. This study basically focuses on
capturing trends in misinformation that Facebook is aware of
as Facebook uses some Political and Fact-checking website
when any user flags the post or report the post as fake. Here,
the comparison of the content is based on category-level web
traffic rankings. Then with the help of page views and number
of visitors, websites are identified and are further categorised
into groups which are set of major websites, set of small
websites and set of business and culture sites [6].
The result of Facebook engagements and Twitter shares can
be seen in Fig 3. Here, one noticeable thing is that there are
some exceptional cases as the database is not in the complete
form so there can some information which do not belong to
these groups of websites and this is why the data provide after
the comparison is still not fully accurate or it may vary over
time [6].
Fig. 3. Engagement on Facebook and Twitter
Though, the relative comparison of both platforms can be
taken into consideration. Both Facebook and Twitter have
made changes to their platforms. Engagements on Facebook
affect sharing on Twitter and vice versa. The change in the
demand may not have the same effect on both the platform

4. but there can be some factors based on which the Facebook-
Twitter ration changes [6].
E. Audiences Acts of Authentication in the Age of Fake News:
a Conceptual Framework
In this research, the conceptual framework is proposed with
a view to how people authenticate fake information on social
media. They stated that individual first try to validate the
information by their own judgements and sources and if they
do not find a satisfactory answer from that then they will
look for the external sources. The researchers ran a study
where they took a survey and asked people an open-ended
question ”How do you verify whether the news you see on
social media, such as Facebook, is correct?”. Based on the
responses researchers go through the answers and divided into
categories and as a result, they came up with the model shown
in Fig 4 [7].
Fig. 4. Conceptual Framework Model
As per the model, when the reader will read or see a post
on social media, he or she will first try to verify it with
internal sources like Self, Source, Message and Popularity.
In the self, the reader will use his/her own intuition. In the
source, the reader will try to validate it from some authenticate
source. In the message, the user will check the tone of the
information. If these all do not help them to confirm the
information, they will look for external sources wherein the
first is Incidental and interpersonal where people passively
wait for acceptance from family and friends. In Incidental and
institutional, an individual will wait for institutional sources
to confirm news instead of searching by themselves. Lastly,
in Intentional and interpersonal, the reader will intentionally
seek out confirmation from others in their social circle [7].
F. Seeing Through Misinformation: A Framework for Identi-
fying Fake Online News
The Oxford Dictionaries named post-truth the word of the
year in the same year when BBC News announced that fake
sources are the really concerned issue in the journalism. The
speed with which the misinformation is spreading cannot be
compared with the history of communication. It is fueled by
the human’s process of understanding the information and
various mediums like social media, online news platforms and
channels and more [8].
To mitigate this issue, the researchers came up with the
framework which basically focuses on the three major concern.
i) Lexical structure, ii) Simplicity, and iii)Emotion [8].
1) Lexical Structure: The misinformation has a specific
syntax structure which distinguishes it with the factual in-
formation. There are some verbs, the content written in the
suspenseful language which we can use to detect the misin-
formation’s presence in online news content [8].
2) Simplicity: The story of the fake news is simple as the
source do not do any kind of background research to write that
story and as a result of it, the writer will only use average verbs
and average complex and lengthy statements [8].
3) Emotion: As per the research, several sources proves
that stories which are emotionally evocative tend to go viral
easily. People will start relating themselves with the story and
the words used in it. Moreover, they found that news with
negative emotion spreads faster than positive emotions [8].
To validate the framework, the researchers selected one
website and gathered some headlines from that. Now, here as
discussed, we have 3 ways to breakdown the news but here the
main focus will be on Emotion. After that, researchers have
classified it into six different categories from ”Blatant lies” to
the ”Truths”. Moreover, they used the mathematical equations
to get the result in classified categories. This LeSiE framework
provides the cues and points out the presence of the fake news
by strong positive and negative words, the number of letters
used in the title, and the preponderance of verbs, adjectives,
names or numbers [8].
G. More than Fake News - Opinion Manipulation
The model concept assumes that accessing data, collective
engagement opportunities and social media will help in the
building of the democratic societies but as negative operation
came into the existence of this model concept, now it is
challenging their wellbeing. Hate speech is getting more
attention. Famous actors and digital marketing disseminate
misinformation to harm opponents [9].
The basic understanding of the propaganda is advertising
or promoting specific ideas, through distortion, lies, mind
control, brainwashing and psychological warfare. It works to
influence the opinion and actions of the people in society
based on various factors such as emotional appeals rather than
rationality. The internet has just changed this meaning of the
propaganda and many people use it to influence people which
is called the computational propaganda which includes robots,
fake accounts, and fake news [9].
A core feature of present fake news is that it has widely
flowed online. The characteristics of fake news are that they
are: 1. Intentional: which produced to harm someone’s reputa-
tion 2. False: which is created to gain popularity 3. Deceptive:
to make people affected by it 4. Inaccurate: which is used to
misguide people by showing false statistics and information
5. Exaggerated: to make people believe which is not even
possible 6. Biased: to favour someone and make an image in
the society and 7. Unacceptable: which cannot be accepted
by society. This factors lead an individual to believe on the

5. information provided on the different platforms and as the
human nature tends to believe in the repetitive information
as truth, the opinion manipulation can be achieved through
propaganda and fake news [9].
III. RELATED WORK
After the aforesaid amount of research work, we are not still
able to mitigate the problem of fake news. In this case, one
approach can be the integration of the related research work
and come up with the new solution which probably will not
help to eliminate but at least will help the society to reduce
the proliferation and impact of fake news.
There can be one proposed solution where the research work
can be done on the different styles of fake news which can
be obtained from the [3] and we can how people interpret
the information [4]. Based on the statistical data, the revised
version of the method used in [5] can be applied in which
the framework from [8] can be incorporated with the exist-
ing solution where three major concern will breakdown the
information and it will be easy to find the actual source of
the information and this way awareness and validation of the
information and the source can be possible. Again, to check
the result of this solution, the conceptual framework from [7]
and characteristics from [9] will be useful.
IV. CONCLUSION
The impact of fake news is aggrandizing day by day, but
there are many research methods which can be useful to
mitigate the challenges faced by society because of fake news.
Though the opportunities for fake news are probably the fake
sources and vulnerability of humans to process the data, it can
be also tackled if the suitable awareness and knowledge can
be provided to the people. As the problem spectrum itself is
too broad, the scope of related solutions are also higher.
For future work, there should be some organization which
can take accountability of the credibility of the news in the
world by enforcing some rules or by using integrated methods
which can be applied to the every journalism media and
sources and the effect of fake news can be eradicated gradually
in some of the years.
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