A Stylometric Inquiry into Hyperpartisan and Fake News
Martin Potthast, Johannes Kiesel, Kevin Reinartz, Janek Bevendorff, Benno Stein
Abstract
We report on a comparative style analysis of hyperpartisan (extremely one-sided) news and fake news. A corpus of 1,627 articles from 9 political publishers, three each from the mainstream, the hyperpartisan left, and the hyperpartisan right, have been fact-checked by professional journalists at BuzzFeed: 97% of the 299 fake news articles identified are also hyperpartisan. We show how a style analysis can distinguish hyperpartisan news from the mainstream (F1 = 0.78), and satire from both (F1 = 0.81). But stylometry is no silver bullet as style-based fake news detection does not work (F1 = 0.46). We further reveal that left-wing and right-wing news share significantly more stylistic similarities than either does with the mainstream. This result is robust: it has been confirmed by three different modeling approaches, one of which employs Unmasking in a novel way. Applications of our results include partisanship detection and pre-screening for semi-automatic fake news detection.- Anthology ID:
- P18-1022
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2018
- Address:
- Melbourne, Australia
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 231–240
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/P18-1022
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/P18-1022
- Cite (ACL):
- Martin Potthast, Johannes Kiesel, Kevin Reinartz, Janek Bevendorff, and Benno Stein. 2018. A Stylometric Inquiry into Hyperpartisan and Fake News. In Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 231–240, Melbourne, Australia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- A Stylometric Inquiry into Hyperpartisan and Fake News (Potthast et al., ACL 2018)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/P18-1022.pdf
- Code
- webis-de/ACL-18
- Data
- BuzzFeed-Webis Fake News Corpus 2016