Towards the identification of fake news in Portuguese

Abstract

All over the world, many initiatives have been taken to fight fake news. Governments (e.g., France, Germany, United Kingdom and Spain), on their own way, started to take action regarding legal accountability for those who manufacture or propagate fake news. Different media outlets have also taken a multitude of initiatives to deal with this phenomenon, such as the increase of discipline, accuracy and transparency of publications made internally. Some structural changes have lately been made in said companies and entities in order to better evaluate news in general. As such, many teams were built entirely to fight fake news - the so-called "fact-checkers". These have been adopting different techniques in order to do so: From the typical use of journalists to find out the true behind a controversial statement, to data-scientists that apply forefront techniques such as text mining and machine learning to support the journalist's decisions. Many of these entities, which aim to maintain or improve their reputation, started to focus on high standards for quality and reliable information, which led to the creation of official and dedicated departments for fact-checking. In this revision paper, not only will we highlight relevant contributions and efforts across the fake news identification and classification status quo, but we will also contextualize the Portuguese language state of affairs in the current state-of-the-art.