CaçaFake: A System for Monitoring and Analyzing Low Credibility Websites in Brazil

• Márcio Silva UFMG / UFMS
• Julio C. S. Reis UFV
• João M. M. Couto UFMG
• Leandro Araújo UFMG
• João Maduro UFMG
• Ana P. C. Silva UFMG
• Jussara M. Almeida UFMG
• Fabrício Benevenuto UFMG

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/webmedia_estendido.2022.227292

Resumo

Combating the spread of misinformation is a complex task. In addition, digital platforms (e.g., social networks, instant messaging apps, etc) enhance the dissemination of content produced by low redibility websites. Thus, monitoring and understanding the main characteristics of these websites has become an important task to interrupt the generation chain and spread of misinformation in our society. In this work, we propose a system called CaçaFake in order to speed up the investigation process by supervisory bodies in the fight against misinformation. Our system displays characteristics associated to websites of low credibility which may be useful to regulatory bodies in their decision-making process, creating a rich resource in the fight against misinformation in Brazil.

Palavras-chave: Fake News, Misinformation, System, Low Credibility Websites

Referências

Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow. 2017. Social media and fake news in the 2016 election. Journal of Economic Perspectives 31, 2 (2017), 211–236.

Leandro Araújo, Luiz Felipe Nery, Isadora Rodrigues, João M. M. Couto, Julio C.S. Reis, Ana Paula Couto Silva, Jussara M. Almeida, and Fabrício Benevenuto. 2022. Identificando Websites de Desinformação no Brasil. In Proc. of the Brazilian Symposium on Databases (SBBD).

João M. M. Couto, Julio C. S. Reis, Ítalo Cunha, Leandro Araújo, and Fabrício Benevenuto. 2022. Caracterizando Websites de Baixa Credibilidade no Brasil. In Brazilian Symposium on Computer Networks and Distributed Systems (SBRC). 503–516.

Leslie Daigle. 2004. WHOIS protocol specification. Technical Report.

Anneliese Depoux, Sam Martin, Emilie Karafillakis, Raman Preet, Annelies Wilder-Smith, and Heidi Larson. 2020. The pandemic of social media panic travels faster than the COVID-19 outbreak. Journal of travel medicine 27, 3 (2020).

Emilio Ferrara. 2017. Disinformation and social bot operations in the run up to the 2017 French presidential election. First Monday 22, 8 (2017).

Philipe Melo, Johnnatan Messias, Gustavo Resende, Kiran Garimella, Jussara Almeida, and Fabrício Benevenuto. 2019. WhatsApp Monitor: A Fact-Checking System for WhatsApp. In Proc. of the Intl AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM). 676–677.

Julio CS Reis, André Correia, Fabrício Murai, Adriano Veloso, and Fabrício Benevenuto. 2019. Supervised learning for fake news detection. IEEE Intelligent Systems 34, 2 (2019), 76–81.

Gustavo Resende, Philipe Melo, Hugo Sousa, Johnnatan Messias, Marisa Vasconcelos, Jussara Almeida, and Fabrício Benevenuto. 2019. (Mis)Information Dissemination in WhatsApp: Gathering, Analyzing and Countermeasures. In Proc. of The Web Conference (WWW). 818–828.

Gustavo Resende, Johnnatan Messias, Márcio Silva, Jussara Almeida, Marisa Vasconcelos, and Fabrício Benevenuto. 2018. A system for monitoring public political groups in WhatsApp. In Proc. of the 24th Brazilian Symposium on Multimedia and the Web (WebMedia). 387–390.

Chengcheng Shao, Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia, Onur Varol, Kai-Cheng Yang, Alessandro Flammini, and Filippo Menczer. 2018. The spread of low-credibility content by social bots. Nature communications 9, 1 (2018), 1–9.

Dominic Spohr. 2017. Fake news and ideological polarization: Filter bubbles and selective exposure on social media. Business Information Review 34, 3 (2017), 150–160.

Sander van Der Linden, Jon Roozenbeek, and Josh Compton. 2020. Inoculating against fake news about COVID-19. Frontiers in psychology 11 (2020), 2928.