April Fools hoax stories may offer clues to help identify “fake news”

Important details for news stories, such as names, places, dates and times, were found to be used less frequently within April Fools hoaxes and fake news. However, proper nouns, such as the names of prominent politicians ‘Trump’ or ‘Hillary’, are more abundant in fake news than in genuine news articles or April Fools, which have significantly fewer.

First person pronouns, such as ‘we’, are also a prominent feature for both April Fools and fake news. This goes against traditional thinking in deception detection, which suggests liars use fewer first person pronouns.

The researchers found that April fools hoax stories, when compared to genuine news:

·  Are generally shorter in length

·  Use more unique words

·  Use longer sentences

·  Are easier to read

·  Refer to vague events in the future

·  Contain more references to the present

·  Are less interested in past events

·  Contain fewer proper nouns

·  Use more first person pronouns

Fake news stories, when compared to genuine news:

·  Are shorter in length

·  Are easier to read

·  Use simplistic language

·  Contain fewer punctuation marks

·  Contain more proper nouns

·  Are generally less formal — use more first names such as ‘Hillary’ and contain more profanity and spelling mistakes

·  Contain very few dates

·  Use more first person pronouns

The researchers also created a machine learning ‘classifier’ to identify if articles are April Fools hoaxes, fake news or genuine news stories. The classifier achieved a 75 per cent accuracy at identifying April Fools articles and 72 per cent for identifying fake news stories. When the classifier was trained on April Fools hoaxes and set the task of identifying fake news it recorded an accuracy of more than 65 per cent.

Dr Alistair Baron, co-author of the paper, said: “Looking at details and complexities within a text are crucial when trying to determine if an article is a hoax. Although there are many differences, our results suggest that April Fools and fake news articles share some similar features, mostly involving structural complexity.

“Our findings suggest that there are certain features in common between different forms of disinformation and exploring these similarities may provide important insights for future research into deceptive news stories.”

— Read more in Edward Dearden and Alistair Baron, “Fool’s Errand: Looking at April Fools Hoaxes as Disinformation through the Lens of Deception and Humor” (paper to be presented at the 20th International Conference on Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing, La Rochelle, France 7 April 20190