The Mass, Fake News, and Cognition Security

Abstract: The wide spread of fake news in social networks is posing threats to social stability, economic development and political democracy etc. Numerous studies have explored the effective detection approaches of online fake news, while few works study the intrinsic propagation and cognition mechanisms of fake news. Since the development of cognitive science paves a promising way for the prevention of fake news, we present a new research area called Cognition Security (CogSec), which studies the potential impacts of fake news to human cognition, ranging from misperception, untrusted knowledge acquisition, targeted opinion/attitude formation, to biased decision making, and investigates the effective ways for fake news debunking. CogSec is a multidisciplinary research field that leverages knowledge from social science, psychology, cognition science, neuroscience, AI and computer science. We first propose related definitions to characterize CogSec and review the literature history. We further investigate the key research challenges and techniques of CogSec, including human-content cognition mechanism, social influence and opinion diffusion, fake news detection and malicious bot detection. Finally, we summarize the open issues and future research directions, such as early detection of fake news, explainable fake news debunking, social contagion and diffusion models of fake news, and so on.