Silence Speaks Volumes: Re-weighting Techniques for Under-Represented Users in Fake News Detection

Social media platforms provide a rich environment for analyzing user behavior. Recently, deep learning-based methods have been a mainstream approach for social media analysis models involving complex patterns. However, these methods are susceptible to biases in the training data, such as participation inequality. Basically, a mere 1% of users generate the majority of the content on social networking sites, while the remaining users, though engaged to varying degrees, tend to be less active in content creation and largely silent. These silent users consume and listen to information that is propagated on the platform. However, their voice, attitude, and interests are not reflected in the online content, making the decision of the current methods predisposed towards the opinion of the active users. So models can mistake the loudest users for the majority. We propose to leverage re-weighting techniques to make the silent majority heard, and in turn, investigate whether the cues from these users can improve the performance of the current models for the downstream task of fake news detection.