Enhancing fake news detection through estimating user tendencies to spread fake news

The growing influence of social media on how people consume information has reshaped the landscape of public communication. Alongside its benefits, this shift has led to the faster spread of fake news, reducing public trust and influencing people’s perception of events. Gaining insight into how fake news propagates and understanding the roles different users play in its dissemination are essential steps toward effective detection. In this research, we investigate how predicting users’ sharing behaviors can improve fake news detection (FND). We introduce a regression-based approach to estimate a user’s Tendency to Spread Fake News (TSFN) by leveraging linguistic features derived from their online posts. To train and evaluate the model, we present two new datasets, each comprising 5000 users. Subsequently, we employ the trained TSFN estimator models for the detection of fake news, presenting a two-step FND system. In the first step, for a given news item, the system estimates the TSFN scores of its spreaders using the trained estimators. Then, leveraging these scores, the system determines the authenticity of the news item. By further combining news content features, the system achieves improved performance. Experimental results indicate that the proposed framework performs reliably even in the early stages of news dissemination. Moreover, we explore how emotional signals contribute to distinguishing between fake and real news and to identifying fake news spreaders, offering valuable insights into the models’ decisions. • Introduce a regression model to estimate users’ tendency to spread fake news. • Propose a two-step system leveraging user tendencies for fake news detection. • Demonstrate effectiveness in detecting fake news even in early propagation stages. • Integrate news content features to improve detection performance. • Analyze emotional signals’ role in identifying fake news and its spreaders.