Unsupervised Fake News Detection Based on Autoencoder

Fake news gains has gained significant momentum, strongly motivating the need for fake news research. Many fake news detection approaches have thus been proposed, where most of them heavily rely on news content. However, networkbased clues revealed when analyzing news propagation on social networks is an information that has hardly been comprehensively explored or used for fake news detection. We bridge this gap by proposing a network-based pattern-driven fake news detection approach. We aim to study the patterns of fake news in social networks, which refer to the news being spread, spreaders of the news and relationships among the spreaders. Empirical evidence and interpretations on the existence of such patterns are provided based on social psychological theories. These patterns are then represented at various network levels (i.e., node-level, ego-level, triad-level, community-level and the overall network) for being further utilized to detect fake news. The proposed approach enhances the explainability in fake news feature engineering. Experiments conducted on real-world data demonstrate that the proposed approach can outperform the state of the arts.

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%.

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.

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%.

Machine learning methods are proposed to mitigate the spread of fake Brazilian news about politics so as not to harm society. Supervised algorithms are explored, requiring labeled news to train. However, labeling a high volume of news can be complex, onerous, time-consuming, error-prone, and costly. Hence, large language models (LLMs) have been used to detect fake news once LLMs are unsupervised methods that can play the role of classifiers. Most fake news detection studies explore the OpenAI LLMs (require payment) and lack an empirical evaluation with other LLMs. However, several open-source models obtain comparative and state-of-the-art (SOTA) results. We highlight that these models have yet to be explored in detecting fake Brazilian news about politics, which is crucial as it directly impacts society. In this sense, we propose a new dataset for detecting fake Brazilian news about politics and an empirical evaluation of open-source LLMs and OpenAI LLMs. In our results, the LLM from Google (Gemma) outperformed the other six LLMs, including GPT-4, proving to be the most promising model for detecting fake news about Brazilian politics.

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.

The evolution of electronic media is a mixed blessing. Due to the easy access, low cost, and faster reach of the information, people search out and devour news from online social networks. In contrast, the increasing acceptance of social media reporting leads to the spread of fake news. This is a minacious problem that causes disputes and endangers the societal stability and harmony. Fake news spread has gained attention from researchers due to its vicious nature. proliferation of misinformation in all media, from the internet to cable news, paid advertising and local news outlets, has made it essential for people to identify the misinformation and sort through the facts. Researchers are trying to analyze the credibility of information and curtail false information on such platforms. Credibility is the believability of the piece of information at hand. Analyzing the credibility of fake news is challenging due to the intent of its creation and the polychromatic nature of the news. In this work, we propose a model for detecting fake news. Our method investigates the content of the news at the early stage i.e., when the news is published but is yet to be disseminated through social media. Our work interprets the content with automatic feature extraction and the relevance of the text pieces. In summary, we introduce stance as one of the features along with the content of the article and employ the pre-trained contextualized word embeddings BERT to obtain the state-of-art results for fake news detection. The experiment conducted on the real-world dataset indicates that our model outperforms the previous work and enables fake news detection with an accuracy of 95.32%.

Due to the widespread use of social networks by people of all ages, distinguishing between fake and real news on these platforms has become a significant challenge in today's world. Individuals who disseminate fake news on social networks often aim to achieve various commercial, political, and economic goals. Therefore, identifying and distinguishing real news from fake news is crucial in addressing this issue. The objective of this research is to present an intelligent model for detecting fake news using a news propagation tree in the social network Twitter. The dataset used in this study is sourced from the political news section of the Fake News Net website. Initially, a news propagation tree was constructed for both real and fake news using this dataset, followed by the development of features from structural, temporal, and syntactic perspectives based on the news propagation tree. Finally, machine learning algorithms were employed to build a model for predicting fake and real news. The results indicated that among the algorithms used for modeling, the Random Forest algorithm, with an accuracy of 75.8%, was the best model for distinguishing fake news from real news.

The widespread dissemination of fake news could have serious negative consequences for individuals and society. First, fake news could upset the balance of authenticity in the news ecosystem. For example, the most popular fake news was more prevalent on Facebook or Instagram media. Second, fake news intentionally persuaded consumers to accept biased or false beliefs. Third, fake news was changing the way people interpret and react to real news. For example, some fake news was created to mistrust and confuse people, so it was impossible, to tell the truth from what was not. To mitigate the negative impact of fake news, it was very important to develop methods to automatically detect fake news in social networks, namely problem-based learning, in order to differentiate between real and fake visual content. Qualitative and quantitative approaches were performed using experimental and control groups to determine whether problem learning could induce students to engage more actively with the topic and develop critical thinking skills to avoid the implicit bias of fake news. This study was conducted at Universitas Katolik Santo Thomas Medan, Indonesia. This research showed that problem-based learning could promote the development of learning communities where learners could freely exchange ideas and ask questions related to the material being studied. Therefore, problem-based learning was an effective way to improve the analytical ability to distinguish between real news and fake news based on the credibility of the news.

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).

Fake news is the kind of news that is made deliberately to deceive the readers. It is a sort of purposeful publicity which is distributed as veritable information. Fake news is spread out through traditional news media and social media. Fake news has been an issue for quite a while. With the introduction of social media, the spread of fake news is increased, and it got hard to separate between true news and fake news. The spread of fake news involves worry as it manipulates public opinions. The widespread of fake news can adversely affect people and society in general. The problem of fake news has increased significantly in recent years. The scope and impact of social media have shifted dramatically. On the one hand, it is low cost and simple accessibility, as well as the ability to quickly exchange information attract people to read news from it. On the other hand, it empowers widespread fake news, which is only false data to deceive people. A stand-alone bidirectional encoder representations from transformers model is used in this paper for fake news detection. We try to pose the problem as a text classification problem and build a deep learning model for achieving the objective. We used the BERT model to develop fake news or real news classification solution for our solution in this model. We achieved more than 95% accuracy on the test set and a remarkable by the area under the curve (AUC) by a stand-alone BERT model.KeywordsNews detectionBERTDeep learningMachine learningSocial mediaTransformerNLP

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.

Classifier algorithms are a subfield of data mining and play an integral role in finding patterns and relationships within large datasets. In recent years, fake news detection has become a popular area of data mining for several important reasons, including its negative impact on decision-making and its virality within social networks. In the past, traditional fake news detection has relied primarily on information context, while modern approaches rely on auxiliary information to classify content. Modelling with machine learning and natural language processing can aid in distinguishing between fake and real news. In this research, we mine data from Reddit, the popular online discussion forum and social news aggregator, and measure machine learning classifiers in order to evaluate each algorithm’s accuracy in detecting fake news using only a minimal subset of data.

Staying up-to-date on news through social media has both advantages and disadvantages. Social media platforms are excellent sources of information, but they also contribute significantly to the spread of fake news (incorrect or poor-quality content). The widespread circulation of such information can profoundly impact society by shaping public opinion, influencing policy debates, and affecting decision-making processes. As a result, fake news detection has become a critical area of research, particularly in multilingual and multicultural contexts. Detecting fake news in Arabic presents unique challenges due to the language’s complexity, diverse dialects, and the limited availability of comprehensive annotated datasets. Many existing detection models are vulnerable to misleading or context-heavy information because they rely primarily on basic content features. This study evaluates the effectiveness of various machine learning and deep learning techniques—including random forest (RF), naive Bayes (NB), feedforward neural networks (FNN), long short-term memory (LSTM), Arabic bidirectional encoder representations from Transformers (BERT), and a hybrid AraBERT + bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) model—in identifying fake news in Arabic media. Experiments were conducted using the Arabic Fake News Dataset (AFND), which contains over 606,000 news items labeled according to credibility. The hybrid AraBERT + Bi-LSTM model outperformed all others, achieving an average F1-score of 98.0%. This model integrates transformer-based contextual embeddings with sequential modeling.

Fake news detection for epidemic emergencies via deep correlations between text and images