The Rise of Guardians: Fact-checking URL Recommendation to Combat Fake News

A large body of research work and efforts have been focused on detecting fake news and building online fact-check systems in order to debunk fake news as soon as possible. Despite the existence of these systems, fake news is still wildly shared by online users. It indicates that these systems may not be fully utilized. After detecting fake news, what is the next step to stop people from sharing it? How can we improve the utilization of these fact-check systems? To fill this gap, in this paper, we (i) collect and analyze online users called guardians, who correct misinformation and fake news in online discussions by referring fact-checking URLs; and (ii) propose a novel fact-checking URL recommendation model to encourage the guardians to engage more in fact-checking activities. We found that the guardians usually took less than one day to reply to claims in online conversations and took another day to spread verified information to hundreds of millions of followers. Our proposed recommendation model outperformed four state-of-the-art models by 11%~33%.