FACTOID: A New Dataset for Identifying Misinformation Spreaders and Political Bias

1 Overview

FACTOID: a user-level FACtuality and pOlitical bIas Dataset, that contains a set of 4,150 news-spreading users with 3.3M Reddit posts in discussions on contemporary political topics, covering the time period from January 2020 to April 2021 on individual user level. You can find the dataset here.

2 Setup

2.1 Environment Setup

• With conda

  conda env export > environment.yml

• With pip

  pip install -r requirements.txt

3 Usage

3.1 Reddit Posts Crawling

Crawl reddit posts using the ids provided in the dataset and fill the empty strings inside the dataframe.

3.2 User Embeddings

First extract user vocabularies

python create_vocabs_per_month.py --base_dataset=../data/reddit_dataset/factoid_dataset.gzip

Then run the codes to generate

• UBERT embeddings

 python user_embeddings_per_month.py --vocabs_dir='../data/user_vocabs_per_month' --base_dataset='../data/reddit_dataset/factoid_dataset.gzip'

• User2Vec
• Psycho Linguistic Features

3.3 Generate Graphs and Samples

To generate graph samples, example script. Change the parameters based on the embeddings you want to use. The argument embed_type takes the following values ['bert', 'usr2vec', 'usr2vec_rand', 'usr2vec_liwc', 'liwc']

python source_graph_generation.py \
--gen_source_graphs=True \
--path='../data/reddit_dataset/linguistic/cosine/avg/bert_embeddings/' \ 
--base_dataset='../data/reddit_dataset/factoid_dataset.gzip' \
--doc_embedding_file_path='../data/embeddings/bert/' \
--embed_type='bert' \
--merge_liwc='false' \
--dim=768 \
--embed_mode='avg' |& tee ../logs/graph_generation.txt

Then after creating the graph samples, run the following to make the split

python model_dataloader.py \
--n_users=200 \
--n_train_samples=1000 \
--n_val_samples=200 \
--base_dataset='../data/reddit_dataset/factoid_dataset.gzip' \
--source_frames='../data/reddit_dataset/linguistic/cosine/avg/bert_embeddings/source' \
--sample_dir='../data/reddit_dataset/model_samples_avg/bert_embeddings/' \
--user_ids='../data/reddit_dataset/user_splits/' \
--threshold=0.8 |& tee ../logs/model_dataloader.txt

3.4 Training Model

After training, validation, test samples are created, run the model using the following

python training_graph.py --patience=40 \
--run_id='bert_embeddings' \
--sample_dir='../data/reddit_dataset/model_samples_avg/bert_embeddings/'  \
--result_dir='../results/' \
--checkpoint_dir='../results/checkpoints/' \
--max_epochs=50 \
--learning_rate=5e-5 \
--nheads=4 \
--dropout=0.2 \
--nhid_graph=256 \
--nhid=128 \
--users_dim=768 \
--gnn='gat' |& tee ../logs/graph_model_main.txt