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The Identification of Fake News via A Cnn-Rnn and Url Classifier

May 24, 2022
by Brian Zhou Liu and Helen Yuting Tang

Abstract: With the COVID-19 pandemic and other global conflicts taking over the media, the rapid dissemination of misinformation online has drawn attention to the problem of fake news. Fake news can have detrimental effects, as demonstrated by the impact of the online anti-masking advocacy in exacerbating the COVID-19 pandemic. Various solutions have been proposed regarding the detection of fake news, with one of the most promising being deep learning. This study aims to advance current deep learning solutions in the field of fake news detection with the development of a CNN-RNN (convolutional neural network-recurrent neural network) with a complementary URL classifier. In constructing the fake news classifier, datasets were run through pre-processing techniques before being used for training. The model was subsequently tested on three datasets, spanning different areas of news: ISOT (general news), ReCOVery (COVID-19 news), and FA-KES (Syrian war news). A user interface additionally facilitated public access to the fake news classifier. After training the model on the ISOT and ReCOVery datasets, the model was able to achieve overall testing accuracies of 0.9898 (ISOT), 0.8466 (ReCOVery), and 0.5441 (FA-KES). Overall, this study broadens the options with which fake news can be identified. 

Keywords – CNN-RNN (convolutional neural network-recurrent neural network), deep learning, fake news, ISOT, FA-KES, ReCOVery, UI (user interface) 

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