News Source Credibility Assessment: A Reddit Case Study
Arash Amini Yigit Ege Bayiz Ashwin Ram Radu Marculescu Ufuk Topcu
In the era of social media platforms, identifying the credibility of online
content is crucial to combat misinformation. We present the CREDiBERT
(CREDibility assessment using Bi-directional Encoder Representations from
Transformers), a source credibility assessment model fine-tuned for Reddit
submissions focusing on political discourse as the main contribution. We adopt
a semi-supervised training approach for CREDiBERT, leveraging Reddit's
community-based structure. By encoding submission content using CREDiBERT and
integrating it into a Siamese neural network, we significantly improve the
binary classification of submission credibility, achieving a 9% increase in F1
score compared to existing methods. Additionally, we introduce a new version of
the post-to-post network in Reddit that efficiently encodes user interactions
to enhance the binary classification task by nearly 8% in F1 score. Finally, we
employ CREDiBERT to evaluate the susceptibility of subreddits with respect to
different topics.