Information Credibility in the Social Web: Contexts, Approaches, and Open Issues

Abstract

In the Social Web scenario, large amounts of User-Generated Content (UGC) are diffused through social media often without almost any form of traditional trusted intermediaries. Therefore, the risk of running into misinformation is not negligible. For this reason, assessing and mining the credibility of online information constitutes nowadays a fundamental research issue. Credibility, also referred as believability, is a quality perceived by individuals, who are not always able to discern, with their own cognitive capacities, genuine information from fake one. Hence, in the last years, several approaches have been proposed to automatically assess credibility in social media. Many of them are based on data-driven models, i.e., they employ machine learning techniques to identify misinformation, but recently also model-driven approaches are emerging, as well as graph-based approaches focusing on credibility propagation, and knowledge-based ones exploiting Semantic Web technologies. Three of the main contexts in which the assessment of information credibility has been investigated concern: (i) the detection of opinion spam in review sites, (ii) the detection of fake news in microblogging, and (iii) the credibility assessment of online health-related information. In this article, the main issues connected to the evaluation of information credibility in the Social Web, which are shared by the above-mentioned contexts, are discussed. A concise survey of the approaches and methodologies that have been proposed in recent years to address these issues is also presented.

Impact of information credibility on social media information adoption behavior: a systematic literature review

“…The findings of earlier studies substantiate the concept that consumers rely on credible information when it comes to social media information. Information having persuasive features compels receivers to accept it (Pasi and Viviani, 2020). The term credibility encompasses a variety of dimensions, such as the quality, currency, accuracy and meaningfulness of a shared message, the credibility of the message producer and the reliability of the medium through which the message is communicated (Afify et al, 2019;Aladhadh et al, 2019;Metzger and Flanagin, 2013;Li and Suh, 2015;Xiao et al, 2018).…”

“…The concept "to identify the credibility of information is quite old" (Pasi and Viviani, 2020). The evidence could be found from Assurbanipal, Alexandrian, Pergamum and similar libraries where the scholars were appointed to identify the authenticity of the required material.…”

“…A few decades ago, in the 1950s, Hovland, Janis and Kelley conducted the first systematic study on mass media and credibility. The researchers explored how people perceive received information as highly and low credible by knowing the source of information (Pasi and Viviani, 2020). Therefore, Lewicki and Bunker (1995) claimed that the criterion to judge the credibility of online information is quite different from face-to-face interactions.…”

Evaluating The Impact of Online Product Review Credibility and Online Product Review Quality on Purchase Intention of Online Consumers

“…The concept of online review credibility, as defined by Pasi and Viviani (2020), revolves around the characteristic that people sense in information, often challenging their ability to distinguish between genuine and fraudulent content using their cognitive abilities. Recent years have witnessed the emergence of various methods aimed at automatically evaluating the reliability of information disseminated on social media platforms since social media also essentially affects consumer behaviour (Torres et al, 2023;Hans et al, 2023).…”