Fabricating Holiness: Characterizing Religious Misinformation Circulators on Arabic Social Media

2025-08-11

AI Summary

This study investigates behavioral and social network differences between disseminators and debunkers of fabricated Hadith on Arabic social media. Addressing the challenge of religious misinformation, we construct a multidimensional feature set integrating follower–followee relationships, interest tags, and interaction patterns from large-scale user behavioral data. We employ logistic regression—novel in this domain—to quantitatively distinguish the two user groups; weight analysis reveals systematic disparities: disseminators disproportionately follow Shi’a and Gulf-region Sunni non-expert accounts, whereas debunkers prefer transnational academic scholars of religion and exhibit greater heterogeneity in secular interests. Our work provides empirical foundations for countering religious disinformation and establishes the first quantitative, binary modeling framework—disseminator versus debunker—specifically tailored to religious contexts.

Technology Category

• Natural Language Processing: Fact-Checking / Misinformation Detection (NLP Focus)
• Application Domains: Misinformation & Fake News
• Reasoning under Uncertainty: Relational Probabilistic Models

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Content-based information diffusion
• Responsible Web: Mitigating misinformation and disinformation
• Social Networks and Social Media: Influence propagation, information diffusion, and the prediction on networks

Abstract

Misinformation is a growing concern in a decade involving critical global events. While social media regulation is mainly dedicated towards the detection and prevention of fake news and political misinformation, there is limited research about religious misinformation which has only been addressed through qualitative approaches. In this work, we study the spread of fabricated quotes (Hadith) that are claimed to belong to Prophet Muhammad (the prophet of Islam) as a case study demonstrating one of the most common religious misinformation forms on Arabic social media. We attempt through quantitative methods to understand the characteristics of social media users who interact with fabricated Hadith. We spotted users who frequently circulate fabricated Hadith and others who frequently debunk it to understand the main differences between the two groups. We used Logistic Regression to automatically predict their behaviors and analyzed its weights to gain insights about the characteristics and interests of each group. We find that both fabricated Hadith circulators and debunkers have generally a lot of ties to religious accounts. However, circulators are identified by many accounts that follow the Shia branch of Islam, Sunni Islamic public figures from the gulf countries, and many Sunni non-professional pages posting Islamic content. On the other hand, debunkers are identified by following academic Islamic scholars from multiple countries and by having more intellectual non-religious interests like charity, politics, and activism.

Problem

• Study spread of fabricated religious quotes on Arabic social media
• Analyze characteristics of users sharing vs debunking fake Hadith
• Predict user behavior using quantitative methods and logistic regression

Innovation

• Quantitative analysis of religious misinformation spreaders
• Logistic Regression to predict user behaviors
• Characterizing circulators vs debunkers via social ties