The current state of fake news: challenges and opportunities

The authenticity of Information has become a longstanding issue affecting businesses and society, both for printed and digital media. On social networks, the reach and effects of information spread occur at such a fast pace and so amplified that distorted, inaccurate or false information acquires a tremendous potential to cause real world impacts, within minutes, for millions of users. Recently, several public concerns about this problem and some approaches to mitigate the problem were expressed. In this paper, we discuss the problem by presenting the proposals into categories: content based, source based and diffusion based. We describe two opposite approaches and propose an algorithmic solution that synthesizes the main concerns. We conclude the paper by raising awareness about concerns and opportunities for businesses that are currently on the quest to help automatically detecting fake news by providing web services, but who will most certainly, on the long term, profit from their massive usage.