Truth of Varying Shades: Analyzing Language in Fake News and Political Fact-Checking

We present an analytic study on the language of news media in the context of political fact-checking and fake news detection. We compare the language of real news with that of satire, hoaxes, and propaganda to find linguistic characteristics of untrustworthy text. To probe the feasibility of automatic political fact-checking, we also present a case study based on PolitiFact.com using their factuality judgments on a 6-point scale. Experiments show that while media fact-checking remains to be an open research question, stylistic cues can help determine the truthfulness of text.

• NS
  National Science Foundation

  Awards: 1256082, DGE-1256082, 1714566, 1408287
• UD
  U.S. Department of Energy
• B
  Battelle
• LD
  Laboratory Directed Research and Development
• PN
  Pacific Northwest National Laboratory