Abstract:
The spread of fake news in online social media platforms has garnered much public attention and apprehension. Consequently, both the industry and academia alike are investing increased effort to understand, detect, and curb fake news. Yet, researchers differ in what they consider to be fake news sites. In this paper, we first aggregate 5 distinct lists of fake news sites, and 3 lists of mainstream news sites published by experts and reputable organizations. Then, using each pair of fake and mainstream news lists as an independent groundtruth, we examine i) the prevalence and ii) temporal characteristics of fake news as well as iii) the agenda-setting differences between fake and mainstream news sites. We observe that depending on the groundtruth, the prevalence of fake news varies significantly. However, the temporal trends and agenda-setting differences between fake and mainstream news sites remain moderately consistent across different groundtruth lists.
