In the midst of today's pervasive influence of social media, automatically detecting fake news is drawing significant attention from both the academic communities and the general public. Existing detection approaches rely on machine learning algorithms with a variety of news characteristics to detect fake news. However, such approaches have a major limitation on detecting fake news early, i.e., the information required for detecting fake news is often unavailable or inadequate at the early stage of news propagation. As a result, the accuracy of early detection of fake news is low. To address this limitation, in this paper, we propose a novel model for early detection of fake news on social media through classifying news propagation paths. We first model the propagation path of each news story as a multivariate time series in which each tuple is a numerical vector representing characteristics of a user who engaged in spreading the news. Then, we build a time series classifier that incorporates both recurrent and convolutional networks which capture the global and local variations of user characteristics along the propagation path respectively, to detect fake news. Experimental results on three real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed model can detect fake news with accuracy 85% and 92% on Twitter and Sina Weibo respectively in 5 minutes after it starts to spread, which is significantly faster than state-of-the-art baselines.

PurposeThis paper aims to provide an integrative review on nation branding literature and to identify new avenues for future research on embedding nation equity into commercial brands.Design/methodology/approachIntegrative review and analysis with conceptual development and future research directions.FindingsThe authors firstly identify conceptualizations and measurements of nation brand as national identity and as national image. Consistently, three theoretical perspectives investigating nation branding were given: first, the macro view focusing on nation brand broadly as political and cultural identity; second, the micro view focusing on nation brand as a country image; and finally, the integrative view using the emerging construct of nation equity. Inspired by the last theoretical view, the authors discuss four research foci that examine nation equity in commercial brands for future research.Originality/valueThe paper provides an integrative understanding of nation branding and identifies novel research opportunities to study this research field – building the connection between nations and commercial brands through nation equity.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine how incidental emotions interact with brand concepts that are represented as human values to influence consumers’ attitude toward brands. It also explores the effect of construal level on such interactional effect. Design/methodology/approach Three incidental emotion × brand concepts between-subject experiments were performed on consumers. The first two experiments used real brands as stimuli, while the third one featured a fictitious brand. Findings Results revealed that the motivational congruency between incidental emotions and brand concepts leads to favorable consumer responses toward the targeted brand by inducing an experience of fluency. However, such effect only emerges among consumers with a high construal level. Originality/value This paper provides a new insight about the effect of brand concept represented as human values by identifying the role of situational factors (incidental emotions) and personal factors (chronic construal level), which are also easily administered and applied in everyday marketing contexts.

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