Detecting and Mitigating the Dissemination of Fake News: Challenges and Future Research Opportunities

Fake news is a major threat to democracy (e.g., influencing public opinion), and its impact cannot be understated particularly in our current socially and digitally connected society. Researchers from different disciplines (e.g., computer science, political science, information science, and linguistics) have also studied the dissemination, detection, and mitigation of fake news; however, it remains challenging to detect and prevent the dissemination of fake news in practice. In addition, we emphasize the importance of designing artificial intelligence (AI)-powered systems that are capable of providing detailed, yet user-friendly, explanations of the classification / detection of fake news. Hence, in this article, we systematically survey existing state-of-the-art approaches designed to detect and mitigate the dissemination of fake news, and based on the analysis, we discuss several key challenges and present a potential future research agenda, especially incorporating AI explainable fake news credibility system.

Automated summary

Fake news poses a significant threat to democracy, especially in our current socially and digitally connected society. Despite research from various disciplines on detecting and mitigating fake news, it remains challenging to prevent its dissemination effectively. Designing artificial intelligence systems that can provide detailed explanations of fake news detection is crucial in combating this issue.