People Lie, Actions Don't! Modeling Infodemic Proliferation Predictors among Social Media Users

Social media is interactive, and interaction brings misinformation. With the growing amount of user-generated data, fake news on online platforms has become much frequent since the arrival of social networks. Now and then, an event occurs and becomes the topic of discussion, generating and propagating false information. Existing literature studying fake news primarily elaborates on fake news classification models. Approaches exploring fake news characteristics and ways to distinguish it from real news are minimal. Not many researches have focused on statistical testing and generating new factor discoveries. This study assumes fourteen hypotheses to identify factors exhibiting a relationship with fake news. We perform the experiments on two real-world COVID-19 datasets using qualitative and quantitative testing methods. This study concludes that sentiment polarity and gender can significantly identify fake news. Dependence on the presence of visual media is, however, inconclusive. Additionally, Twitter-specific factors like followers count, friends count, and retweet count significantly differ in fake and real news. Though, the contribution of status count and favorites count is disputed. This study identifies practical factors to be conjunctly utilized in the development of fake news detection algorithms.