Multi-Agent Fact Checking

Abstract

We formulate the problem of fake news detection using distributed fact-checkers (agents) with unknown reliability. The stream of news/statements is modeled as an independent and identically distributed binary source (to represent true and false statements). Upon observing a news, agent $i$ labels the news as true or false which reflects the true validity of the statement with some probability $1-\pi_i$. In other words, agent $i$ misclassified each statement with error probability $\pi_i\in (0,1)$, where the parameter $\pi_i$ models the (un)trustworthiness of agent $i$. We present an algorithm to learn the unreliability parameters, resulting in a distributed fact-checking algorithm. Furthermore, we extensively analyze the discrete-time limit of our algorithm.