Fake News Detection using Machine Learning

The phenomenon of Fake news is experiencing a rapid and growing progress with the evolution of the means of communication and Social media. Fake news detection is an emerging research area which is gaining big interest. It faces however some challenges due to the limited resources such as datasets and processing and analysing techniques. In this work, we propose a system for Fake news detection that uses machine learning techniques. We used term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) of bag of words and n-grams as feature extraction technique, and Support Vector Machine (SVM) as a classifier. We propose also a dataset of fake and true news to train the proposed system. Obtained results show the efficiency of the system. In this work, we propose a system for Fake news detection that uses machine learning techniques. We used term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) of bag of words and n-grams as feature extraction technique, and Support Vector Machine (SVM) as a classifier. We propose also a dataset of fake and true news to train the proposed system. Obtained results show the efficiency of the system.

Fake news detection on job advertisements has grabbed the attention of many researchers over past decade. Various classifiers such as Support Vector Machine (SVM), XGBoost Classifier and Random Forest (RF) methods are greatly utilized for fake and real news detection pertaining to job advertisement posts in social media. Bi-Directional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) classifier is greatly utilized for learning word representations in lower-dimensional vector space and learning significant words word embedding or terms revealed through Word embedding algorithm. The fake news detection is greatly achieved along with real news on job post from online social media is achieved by Bi-LSTM classifier and thereby evaluating corresponding performance. The performance metrics such as Precision, Recall, F1-score, and Accuracy are assessed for effectiveness by fraudulency based on job posts. The outcome infers the effectiveness and prominence of features for detecting false news. .

The online spread of fake news on various platforms has emerged as a significant concern, posing threats to public opinion, political stability, and the dissemination of reliable information. Researchers have turned to advanced technologies, including machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) techniques, to detect and classify fake news to address this issue. This research study explores fake news classification using diverse ML and DL approaches. We utilized a well-known “Fake News” dataset sourced from Kaggle, encompassing a labelled news collection. We implemented diverse ML models, including multinomial naïve bayes (MNB), gaussian naïve bayes (GNB), Bernoulli naïve Bayes (BNB), logistic regression (LR), and passive aggressive classifier (PAC). Additionally, we explored DL models, such as long short-term memory (LSTM), convolutional neural networks (CNN), and CNN-LSTM. We compared the performance of these models based on key evaluation metrics, such as accuracy, precision, recall, and the F1 score. Additionally, we conducted cross-validation and hyperparameter tuning to ensure optimal performance. The results provide valuable insights into the strengths and weaknesses of each model in classifying fake news. We observed that DL models, particularly LSTM and CNN-LSTM, showed better performance compared to traditional ML models. These models achieved higher accuracy and demonstrated robustness in classification tasks. These findings emphasize the potential of DL models to tackle the spread of fake news effectively and highlight the importance of utilizing advanced techniques to address this challenging problem.

With the extensive technological advancements and expansion, the persistent issues regarding the creation and rapid dissemination of fake news have become a prevalent and recurrent concern. The manipulation of news content has critical repercussions, such as causing public mistrust, fear, harm, and misinformation. Addressing that, this study developed a supervised machine learning algorithm that can accurately classify social media data as fake news. The methodology of the proposed fake news detection model involved five main components: data acquisition from Twitter, data preprocessing, data transformation, model development using Naïve Bayes, decision tree, and support vector machine (SVM) and model evaluation using accuracy, precision, recall and F1-score. The results revealed that decision tree recorded the highest accuracy for both textual data (100%) and metadata (94.54%) and consistently outperformed both Naïve Bayes and SVM in terms of precision, recall, and F1-score metrics, with a score of 100% for the classification of textual data-based datasets. Regarding the metadata-based classification, decision tree also demonstrated excellent performance, with the highest F1-score of 94% for fake news data. Meanwhile, SVM exhibited the highest precision and recall performance for the metadata-based classification. Overall, the application of the decision tree classifier was deemed the most effective in Twitter fake news detection.

Nowadays, the dissemination of news information has become more rapid, liberal, and open to the public. People can find what they want to know more and more easily from a variety of sources, including traditional news outlets and new social media platforms. However, at a time when our lives are glutted with all kinds of news, we cannot help but doubt the veracity and legitimacy of these news sources; meanwhile, we also need to guard against the possible impact of various forms of fake news. To combat the spread of misinformation, more and more researchers have turned to natural language processing (NLP) approaches for effective fake news detection. However, in the face of increasingly serious fake news events, existing detection methods still need to be continuously improved. This study proposes a modified proof-of-concept model named NER-SA, which integrates natural language processing (NLP) and named entity recognition (NER) to conduct the in-domain and cross-domain analysis of fake news detection with the existing three datasets simultaneously. The named entities associated with any particular news event exist in a finite and available evidence pool. Therefore, entities must be mentioned and recognized in this entity bank in any authentic news articles. A piece of fake news inevitably includes only some entitlements in the entity bank. The false information is deliberately fabricated with fictitious, imaginary, and even unreasonable sentences and content. As a result, there must be differences in statements, writing logic, and style between legitimate news and fake news, meaning that it is possible to successfully detect fake news. We developed a mathematical model and used the simulated annealing algorithm to find the optimal legitimate area. Comparing the detection performance of the NER-SA model with current state-of-the-art models proposed in other studies, we found that the NER-SA model indeed has superior performance in detecting fake news. For in-domain analysis, the accuracy increased by an average of 8.94% on the LIAR dataset and 19.36% on the fake or real news dataset, while the F1-score increased by an average of 24.04% on the LIAR dataset and 19.36% on the fake or real news dataset. In cross-domain analysis, the accuracy and F1-score for the NER-SA model increased by an average of 28.51% and 24.54%, respectively, across six domains in the FakeNews AMT dataset. The findings and implications of this study are further discussed with regard to their significance for improving accuracy, understanding context, and addressing adversarial attacks. The development of stylometric detection based on NLP approaches using NER techniques can improve the effectiveness and applicability of fake news detection.

Filtering, vetting, and verifying digital information is an area of core interest in information science. Online fake news is a specific type of digital misinformation that poses serious threats to democratic institutions, misguides the public, and can lead to radicalization and violence. Hence, fake news detection is an important problem for information science research. While there have been multiple attempts to identify fake news, most of such efforts have focused on a single modality (e.g., only text‐based or only visual features). However, news articles are increasingly framed as multimodal news stories, and hence, in this work, we propose a multimodal approach combining text and visual analysis of online news stories to automatically detect fake news. Drawing on key theories of information processing and presentation, we identify multiple text and visual features that are associated with fake or credible news articles. We then perform a predictive analysis to detect features most strongly associated with fake news. Next, we combine these features in predictive models using multiple machine‐learning techniques. The experimental results indicate that a multimodal approach outperforms single‐modality approaches, allowing for better fake news detection.

Fake news detection within online social media using supervised artificial intelligence algorithms

Fake news analysis and detection is a method that requires using machine learning classifiers to recognize and detect news content as fake or real. No research work has been carried out on fake news analysis and detection using the machine learning algorithms using Truncated singular value decomposition (TSVD) on the ‘ISOT Fake News Dataset’ but there is a need for a better design that can provide better accuracy. This research aims to develop and use systematic progression in identifying fake news analysis using machine learning algorithms with TSVD. The machine learning algorithms which include the light Gradient Boosting Machine, Cat boosting classifier, and support vector machine with TSVD were used on ‘The ISOT Fake News Dataset’ to recognize the fake news from real news in the dataset, thereby improving the performance of these classifiers by cleaning the data to manage the data imbalances more efficiently. The recommended design yields an exactness of 97.33%. The postulated technique out classifies the current classifiers which possess an exactness of 95.05%. We recommend that Machine learning classifiers using TSVD should be applied in Fake News analysis and detection since it gives a better performance accuracy in fake news analysis and detection

Due to the widespread use of social media, people are exposed to fake news and misinformation. Spreading fake news has adverse effects on both the general public and governments. This issue motivated researchers to utilize advanced natural language processing concepts to detect such misinformation in social media. Despite the recent research studies that only focused on semantic features extracted by deep contextualized text representation models, we aim to show that content-based feature engineering can enhance the semantic models in a complex task like fake news detection. These features can provide valuable information from different aspects of input texts and assist our neural classifier in detecting fake and real news more accurately than using semantic features. To substantiate the effectiveness of feature engineering besides semantic features, we proposed a deep neural architecture in which three parallel convolutional neural network (CNN) layers extract semantic features from contextual representation vectors. Then, semantic and content-based features are fed to a fully connected layer. We evaluated our model on an English dataset about the COVID-19 pandemic and a domain-independent Persian fake news dataset (TAJ). Our experiments on the English COVID-19 dataset show 4.16% and 4.02% improvement in accuracy and f1-score, respectively, compared to the baseline model, which does not benefit from the content-based features. We also achieved 2.01% and 0.69% improvement in accuracy and f1-score, respectively, compared to the state-of-the-art results reported by Shifath et al. (A transformer based approach for fighting covid-19 fake news, arXiv preprint arXiv:2101.12027, 2021). Our model outperformed the baseline on the TAJ dataset by improving accuracy and f1-score metrics by 1.89% and 1.74%, respectively. The model also shows 2.13% and 1.6% improvement in accuracy and f1-score, respectively, compared to the state-of-the-art model proposed by Samadi et al. (ACM Trans Asian Low-Resour Lang Inf Process, https://doi.org/10.1145/3472620, 2021).

The recent advancements made in World Wide Web and social networking have eased the spread of fake news among people at a faster rate. At most of the times, the intention of fake news is to misinform the people and make manipulated societal insights. The spread of low-quality news in social networking sites has a negative influence upon people as well as the society. In order to overcome the ever-increasing dissemination of fake news, automated detection models are developed using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) methods. The latest advancements in Deep Learning (DL) models and complex Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks make the former, a significant solution to achieve Fake News Detection (FND). In this background, the current study focuses on design and development of Natural Language Processing with Sea Turtle Foraging Optimization-based Deep Learning Technique for Fake News Detection and Classification (STODL-FNDC) model. The aim of the proposed STODL-FNDC model is to discriminate fake news from legitimate news in an effectual manner. In the proposed STODL-FNDC model, the input data primarily undergoes pre-processing and Glove-based word embedding. Besides, STODL-FNDC model employs Deep Belief Network (DBN) approach for detection as well as classification of fake news. Finally, STO algorithm is utilized after adjusting the hyperparameters involved in DBN model, in an optimal manner. The novelty of the study lies in the design of STO algorithm with DBN model for FND. In order to improve the detection performance of STODL-FNDC technique, a series of simulations was carried out on benchmark datasets. The experimental outcomes established the better performance of STODL-FNDC approach over other methods with a maximum accuracy of 95.50%.

Recently, fake news has been widely spread through the Internet due to the increased use of social media for communication. Fake news has become a significant concern due to its harmful impact on individual attitudes and the community’s behavior. Researchers and social media service providers have commonly utilized artificial intelligence techniques in the recent few years to rein in fake news propagation. However, fake news detection is challenging due to the use of political language and the high linguistic similarities between real and fake news. In addition, most news sentences are short, therefore finding valuable representative features that machine learning classifiers can use to distinguish between fake and authentic news is difficult because both false and legitimate news have comparable language traits. Existing fake news solutions suffer from low detection performance due to improper representation and model design. This study aims at improving the detection accuracy by proposing a deep ensemble fake news detection model using the sequential deep learning technique. The proposed model was constructed in three phases. In the first phase, features were extracted from news contents, preprocessed using natural language processing techniques, enriched using n-gram, and represented using the term frequency–inverse term frequency technique. In the second phase, an ensemble model based on deep learning was constructed as follows. Multiple binary classifiers were trained using sequential deep learning networks to extract the representative hidden features that could accurately classify news types. In the third phase, a multi-class classifier was constructed based on multilayer perceptron (MLP) and trained using the features extracted from the aggregated outputs of the deep learning-based binary classifiers for final classification. The two popular and well-known datasets (LIAR and ISOT) were used with different classifiers to benchmark the proposed model. Compared with the state-of-the-art models, which use deep contextualized representation with convolutional neural network (CNN), the proposed model shows significant improvements (2.41%) in the overall performance in terms of the F1score for the LIAR dataset, which is more challenging than other datasets. Meanwhile, the proposed model achieves 100% accuracy with ISOT. The study demonstrates that traditional features extracted from news content with proper model design outperform the existing models that were constructed based on text embedding techniques.

The rise of fake news has become a significant global concern, undermining public trust and information integrity. This study explores the application of advanced machine learning algorithms for detecting fake news, leveraging a balanced dataset of real and fake news articles. Through rigorous preprocessing, including text cleaning and Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) vectorization, the study enhances data quality and model performance. Five machine learning models—Random Forest, Support Vector Machine (SVM), Neural Networks, Logistic Regression, and Naïve Bayes—are systematically evaluated using metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. Results indicate that the Random Forest Classifier outperforms other models with an accuracy of 99.95% and balanced performance across metrics, demonstrating its robustness in distinguishing fake from real news. SVM and Neural Networks also achieve high accuracy, showcasing their capability in handling complex data. Logistic Regression and Naïve Bayes, while computationally efficient, exhibit relatively lower performance. The findings underscore the importance of ensemble methods and sophisticated preprocessing techniques in detecting fake news effectively. This research provides a methodological framework for scalable fake news detection, offering valuable insights for developing automated systems to combat misinformation and promote informed decision-making in the digital age.

Fake news have attracted attention of general public because of the influence they can exert on important activities of society, such as elections. Efforts have been made to detect them, but usually they rely on human labour fact-checking, what can be costly and time consuming. Computational approaches have typically relied on supervised learning models, in which a model is trained based on fake and true news samples. Such approach allows a large amount of news to be classified in a short time, but it demands datasets labelled with positive and negative instances. Our work proposes to detect fake news by training a model with only fake samples in the training dataset, through One-Class Classification (OCC). We compare a novel algorithm, called DCDistanceOCC, to others published in literature, and got similar, or even better, results. The case study is the Brazilian politics scenario starting at the 2018 general elections on Twitter and WhatsApp. These two platforms were a fertile ground to fake news proliferation. We also evaluated the models over another available dataset from literature. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to identify fake news using an OCC approach and also the first one to provide Portuguese-based WhatsApp and Twitter datasets with fake news.

In perceptual decision-making, it is well-known that low confidence in a decision promotes information seeking, which increases subsequent decision accuracy. It is unclear, however, whether these mechanisms generalize to more complex domains such as fake news detection. Here, we tested whether confidence also drives information seeking in the context of fake news, whether seeking information improves fake news detection and sharing intentions, and whether we find confidence-driven confirmation biases. In an online study, 314 US citizens indicated whether news headlines were true or fake and could request additional information before finalizing their decision. First, in line with findings from perceptual decision-making, confidence was the main driver of information seeking for both fake and true news. Yet critically, whereas confidence lawfully scaled with decision accuracy for true news items, we found a U-shaped relationship for fake news items: decision accuracy was lowest for intermediate confidence, indicating that for fake headlines confidence is not a reliable signal of headline veracity. Second, while information seeking increased decision accuracy for true news items, for fake news items decision accuracy remained at chance level even after information seeking. Sharing intentions for fake news remained equally unaffected by information seeking, and mostly increased for belief-congruent true items. Finally, we found a confidence-driven confirmation bias for beliefs, but not for sharing intentions. Together, our results clarify that while confidence-driven information seeking adaptively increases decision accuracy for true news items, it is entirely ineffective in the context of fake news.

Nowadays, with the advancement of technology, the use of news sources has also undergone a great evolution. News sources have constantly evolved from past to present, ranging from magazines to radios, from newspapers to televisions. The fact that it has become so easy to access news has caused society to pay more attention to fake news. Fake news has the ability to influence society through news sources such as social media, which can reach wider audiences with the development of technology. The difficulties of users in accessing accurate and reliable sources in this information flow that shapes their daily lives increases the potential for the spread of fake news, and it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between real and fake news. In this study, classification models for fake news detection were designed using machine learning algorithms. The dataset, which includes fake and real news examples, contains 42,000 examples. Each class, including fake and real samples, contains 22,000 sample data. In order to increase data quality, accuracy and usability, preprocessing methods were applied to the data set. The removal of numbers, stop words, and html tags was done in the pre-processing step to remove unnecessary information from the text. Models were created for fake news detection with singular and ensemble classification algorithms. Performance evaluation of the models was performed using 5-fold cross-validation. In the performance comparisons of the models, values such as accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, tp rate and fp rate were calculated. The highest performance results were observed in the random forest classification algorithm with an accuracy rate of 76%.