Credibility-based Fake News Detection
Table 6: Distribution of digits in fake and true news
['[BOLD] Mean Fake News', '[BOLD] Mean True News', '[BOLD] Median Fake News', '[BOLD] Median True News']
To build strong arguments in a news article, one can rely on providing data and references. A greater occurrence of numbers or digits may indicate that a news article is well-researched, containing verifiable data; similarly, the occurrence of hyperlinks and URLs may indicate citations suggesting that an article is supported by external sources. The connections between URLs and credibility have been studied earlier on tweets [castillo2011information, gupta2014tweetcred]. Similarly, the findings from Koetsenruijter [koetsenruijter2011using] suggests that the presence of numbers in an article conveys credibility. Hence, we studied whether there is a difference between fake news and true news in terms of numbers of URLs. We found that only 18 news articles contained URLs, of which 7 were fake news and 11 were true news. With presence of URL in small proportion of dataset, it is difficult to assess credibility strength based on this feature. Our findings suggest that there are differences between fake news and true news based on the use of numbers in the news content, and that it is likely that true news is supported with facts that include numbers.