RPf-GCNs: reciprocal perspective driven fused GCNs for rumor detection on social media

Abstract The earliest detection of rumors across social media is the need to the hour in present global village. User’s are seamlessly connected in an unstructured network leading to rapid flow of information. User’s on the social media with malign intents may share defamatory content to contribute towards the fifth generation media warfare. The ingress of such defamatory content into society can result in panic, uncertainty and demoralization the peoples. Due to the huge amount of content over social platforms, the detection of malicious contents is hard. Earlier research while focuses on content profiling and flow of information, however, the reciprocal perspective of the source and following contents is missing. In this research, a novel Reciprocal Perspective fused Graph Convolutional Neural Network (RPf-GCN) is proposed. The proposed framework incorporates twin GCNs to encode both the bottom-up and top-down perspectives, enhancing the understanding of rumor propagation. Moreover convolutional operation is employed to fuse reciprocal perspective, providing a holistic view of the conversations. To validate the efficacy of the proposed framework, we conducted a series of experiments using real-world datasets, including PHEME and SemEval. Experimentation performed illustrates that the proposed framework outperformed over various baselines in two different evaluation metrics namely Macro F1 (for PHEME 0.736, for SemEval 0.461) and Accuracy (for PHEME 0.748, for SemEval 0.658).