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With the rapid growth of social media platforms and online news consumption, the proliferation of fake news has emerged as a pressing concern. Detecting and combating fake news has become crucial in ensuring the accuracy and reliability of information disseminated through social media. Machine learning plays a crucial role in fake news detection due to its ability to analyze large amounts of data and identify patterns and trends that are indicative of misinformation. Fake news detection involves analyzing various types of data, such as textual or media content, social context, and network structure. Machine learning techniques enable automated and scalable detection of fake news, which is essential given the vast volume of information shared on social media platforms. Overall, machine learning provides a powerful tool for detecting and preventing the spread of fake news on social media. This review article provides an extensive analysis of recent advancements in fake news detection. The chosen articles cover a wide range of approaches, including data mining, deep learning, natural language processing (NLP), ensemble learning, transfer learning, and graph-based techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the current shift in the mass media landscape from journalistic rigor to social media, personalized social media is becoming the new norm. Although the digitalization progress of the media brings many advantages, it also increases the risk of spreading disinformation, misinformation, and malformation through the use of fake news. The emergence of this harmful phenomenon has managed to polarize society and manipulate public opinion on particular topics, e.g., elections, vaccinations, etc. Such information propagated on social media can distort public perceptions and generate social unrest while lacking the rigor of traditional journalism. Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning techniques are essential for developing efficient tools that can detect fake news. Models that use the context of textual data are essential for resolving the fake news detection problem, as they manage to encode linguistic features within the vector representation of words. In this paper, we propose a new approach that uses document embeddings to build multiple models that accurately label news articles as reliable or fake. We also present a benchmark on different architectures that detect fake news using binary or multi-labeled classification. We evaluated the models on five large news corpora using accuracy, precision, and recall. We obtained better results than more complex state-of-the-art Deep Neural Network models. We observe that the most important factor for obtaining high accuracy is the document encoding, not the classification model's complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

News media agencies are known to publish misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda for the sake of money, higher news propagation, political influence, or other unfair reasons. The exponential increase in the use of social media has also contributed to the frequent spread of fake news. This study extends the concept of symmetry into deep learning approaches for advanced natural language processing, thereby improving the identification of fake news and propaganda. A hybrid HyproBert model for automatic fake news detection is proposed in this paper. To begin, the proposed HyproBert model uses DistilBERT for tokenization and word embeddings. The embeddings are provided as input to the convolution layer to highlight and extract the spatial features. Subsequently, the output is provided to BiGRU to extract the contextual features. The CapsNet, along with the self-attention layer, proceeds to the output of BiGRU to model the hierarchy relationship among the spatial features. Finally, a dense layer is implemented to combine all the features for classification. The proposed HyproBert model is evaluated using two fake news datasets (ISOT and FA-KES). As a result, HyproBert achieved a higher performance compared to other baseline and state-of-the-art models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Efforts have been dedicated by researchers in the field of natural language processing (NLP) to detecting and combating fake news using an assortment of machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) techniques. In this paper, a review of the existing studies is conducted to understand and curtail the dissemination of fake news. Specifically, we conducted a benchmark study using a wide range of (1) classical ML algorithms such as logistic regression (LR), support vector machines (SVM), decision tree (DT), naive Bayes (NB), random forest (RF), XGBoost (XGB) and an ensemble learning method of such algorithms, (2) advanced ML algorithms such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs), bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM), bidirectional gated recurrent units (BiGRU), CNN-BiLSTM, CNN-BiGRU and a hybrid approach of such techniques and (3) DL transformer-based models such as BERT b a s e and RoBERTa b a s e . The experiments are carried out using different pretrained word embedding methods across four well-known real-world fake news datasets—LIAR, PolitiFact, GossipCop and COVID-19—to examine the performance of different techniques across various datasets. Furthermore, a comparison is made between context-independent embedding methods (e.g., GloVe) and the effectiveness of BERT b a s e —contextualised representations in detecting fake news. Compared with the state of the art's results across the used datasets, we achieve better results by solely relying on news text. We hope this study can provide useful insights for researchers working on fake news detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The explosive growth of the social media community has increased many kinds of misinformation and is attracting tremendous attention from the research community. One of the most prevalent ways of misleading news is cheapfakes. Cheapfakes utilize non-AI techniques such as unaltered images with false context news to create false news, which makes it easy and "cheap" to create and leads to an abundant amount in the social media community. Moreover, the development of deep learning also opens and invents many domains relevant to news such as fake news detection, rumour detection, fact-checking, and verification of claimed images. Nevertheless, despite the impact on and harmfulness of cheapfakes for the social community and the real world, there is little research on detecting cheapfakes in the computer science domain. It is challenging to detect misused/false/out-of-context pairs of images and captions, even with human effort, because of the complex correlation between the attached image and the veracity of the caption content. Existing research focuses mostly on training and evaluating on given dataset, which makes the proposal limited in terms of categories, semantics and situations based on the characteristics of the dataset. In this paper, to address these issues, we aimed to leverage textual semantics understanding from the large corpus and integrated with different combinations of text-image matching and image captioning methods via ANN/Transformer boosting schema to classify a triple of (image, caption1, caption2) into OOC (out-of-context) and NOOC (no out-of-context) labels. We customized these combinations according to various exceptional cases that we observed during data analysis. We evaluate our approach using the dataset and evaluation metrics provided by the COSMOS baseline. Compared to other methods, including the baseline, our method achieves the highest Accuracy, Recall, and F1 scores. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the possibilities for federated learning with a deep learning method as a basic approach to train detection models for fake news recognition. Federated learning is the key issue in this research because this kind of learning makes machine learning more secure by training models on decentralized data at decentralized places, for example, at different IoT edges. The data are not transformed between decentralized places, which means that personally identifiable data are not shared. This could increase the security of data from sensors in intelligent houses and medical devices or data from various resources in online spaces. Each station edge could train a model separately on data obtained from its sensors and on data extracted from different sources. Consequently, the models trained on local data on local clients are aggregated at the central ending point. We have designed three different architectures for deep learning as a basis for use within federated learning. The detection models were based on embeddings, CNNs (convolutional neural networks), and LSTM (long short-term memory). The best results were achieved using more LSTM layers (F1 = 0.92). On the other hand, all three architectures achieved similar results. We also analyzed results obtained using federated learning and without it. As a result of the analysis, it was found that the use of federated learning, in which data were decomposed and divided into smaller local datasets, does not significantly reduce the accuracy of the models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The widespread use of social networks has brought to the foreground a very important issue, the veracity of the information circulating within them. Many natural language processing methods have been proposed in the past to assess a post's content with respect to its reliability; however, end-to-end approaches are not comparable in ability to human beings. To overcome this, in this paper, we propose the use of a more modular approach that produces indicators about a post's subjectivity and the stance provided by the replies it has received to date, letting the user decide whether (s)he trusts or does not trust the provided information. To this end, we fine-tuned state-of-the-art transformer-based language models and compared their performance with previous related work on stance detection and subjectivity analysis. Finally, we discuss the obtained results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media, fake news, and different propaganda strategies have all contributed to an increase in misinformation online during the past ten years. As a result of the scarcity of high-quality data, the present datasets cannot be used to train a deep-learning model, making it impossible to establish an identification. We used a natural language processing approach to the issue in order to create a system that uses deep learning to automatically identify propaganda in news items. To assist the scholarly community in identifying propaganda in text news, this study suggested the propaganda texts (ProText) library. Truthfulness labels are assigned to ProText repositories after being manually and automatically verified with fact-checking methods. Additionally, this study proposed using a fine-tuned Robustly Optimized BERT Pre-training Approach (RoBERTa) and word embedding using multi-label multi-class text classification. Through experimentation and comparative research analysis, we address critical issues and collaborate to discover answers. We achieved an evaluation performance accuracy of 90%, 75%, 68%, and 65% on ProText, PTC, TSHP-17, and Qprop, respectively. The big-data method, particularly with deep-learning models, can assist us in filling out unsatisfactory big data in a novel text classification strategy. We urge collaboration to inspire researchers to acquire, exchange datasets, and develop a standard aimed at organizing, labeling, and fact-checking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In social media, users are spreading misinformation easily and without fact checking. In principle, they do not have a malicious intent, but their sharing leads to a socially dangerous diffusion mechanism. The motivations behind this behavior have been linked to a wide variety of social and personal outcomes, but these users are not easily identified. The existing solutions show how the analysis of linguistic signals in social media posts combined with the exploration of network topologies are effective in this field. These applications have some limitations such as focusing solely on the fake news shared and not understanding the typology of the user spreading them. In this paper, we propose a computational approach to extract features from the social media posts of these users to recognize who is a fake news spreader for a given topic. Thanks to the CoAID dataset, we start the analysis with 300 K users engaged on an online micro-blogging platform; then, we enriched the dataset by extending it to a collection of more than 1 M share actions and their associated posts on the platform. The proposed approach processes a batch of Twitter posts authored by users of the CoAID dataset and turns them into a high-dimensional matrix of features, which are then exploited by a deep neural network architecture based on transformers to perform user classification. We prove the effectiveness of our work by comparing the precision, recall, and f 1 score of our model with different configurations and with a baseline classifier. We obtained an f 1 score of 0.8076, obtaining an improvement from the state-of-the-art by 4%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past decade, the rapid spread of large volumes of online information among an increasing number of social network users is observed. It is a phenomenon that has often been exploited by malicious users and entities, which forge, distribute, and reproduce fake news and propaganda. In this paper, we present a novel approach to the automatic detection of fake news on Twitter that involves (a) pairwise text input, (b) a novel deep neural network learning architecture that allows for flexible input fusion at various network layers, and (c) various input modes, like word embeddings and both linguistic and network account features. Furthermore, tweets are innovatively separated into news headers and news text, and an extensive experimental setup performs classification tests using both. Our main results show high overall accuracy performance in fake news detection. The proposed deep learning architecture outperforms the state-of-the-art classifiers, while using fewer features and embeddings from the tweet text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Topological data analysis has recently found applications in various areas of science, such as computer vision and understanding of protein folding. However, applications of topological data analysis to natural language processing remain under-researched. This study applies topological data analysis to a particular natural language processing task: fake news detection. We have found that deep learning models are more accurate in this task than topological data analysis. However, assembling a deep learning model with topological data analysis significantly improves the model's accuracy if the available training set is very small. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last few years, the phenomenon of fake news has become an important issue, especially during the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, and also a serious risk for the public health. Due to the huge amount of information that is produced by the social media such as Facebook and Twitter it is becoming difficult to check the produced contents manually. This study proposes an automatic fake news detection system that supports or disproves the dubious claims while returning a set of documents from verified sources. The system is composed of multiple modules and it makes use of different techniques from machine learning, deep learning and natural language processing. Such techniques are used for the selection of relevant documents, to find among those, the ones that are similar to the tested claim and their stances. The proposed system will be used to check medical news and, in particular, the trustworthiness of posts related to the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccine and cure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The spreading of accidental or malicious misinformation on social media, specifically in critical situations, such as real-world emergencies, can have negative consequences for society. This facilitates the spread of rumors on social media. On social media, users share and exchange the latest information with many readers, including a large volume of new information every second. However, updated news sharing on social media is not always true.In this study, we focus on the challenges of numerous breaking-news rumors propagating on social media networks rather than long-lasting rumors. We propose new social-based and content-based features to detect rumors on social media networks. Furthermore, our findings show that our proposed features are more helpful in classifying rumors compared with state-of-the-art baseline features. Moreover, we apply bidirectional LSTM-RNN on text for rumor prediction. This model is simple but effective for rumor detection. The majority of early rumor detection research focuses on long-running rumors and assumes that rumors are always false. In contrast, our experiments on rumor detection are conducted on real-world scenario data set. The results of the experiments demonstrate that our proposed features and different machine learning models perform best when compared to the state-of-the-art baseline features and classifier in terms of precision, recall, and F1 measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]