Bayesian Graph Local Extrema Convolution with Long-tail Strategy for Misinformation Detection

It has become a cardinal task to identify fake information (misinformation) on social media, because it has significantly harmed the government and the public. There are many spam bots maliciously retweeting misinformation. This study proposes an efficient model for detecting misinformation with self-supervised contrastive learning. A Bayesian graph Local extrema Convolution (BLC) is first proposed to aggregate node features in the graph structure. The BLC approach considers unreliable relationships and uncertainties in the propagation structure, and the differences between nodes and neighboring nodes are emphasized in the attributes. Then, a new long-tail strategy for matching long-tail users with the global social network is advocated to avoid over-concentration on high-degree nodes in graph neural networks. Finally, the proposed model is experimentally evaluated with two public Twitter datasets and demonstrates that the proposed long-tail strategy significantly improves the effectiveness of existing graph-based methods in terms of detecting misinformation. The robustness of BLC has also been examined on three graph datasets and demonstrates that it consistently outperforms traditional algorithms when perturbed by 15% of a dataset.