Unmasking Fake News with Emotional Cues: A Comparative Study of Sentiment Reasoning Models

Discerning truth from deception requires innovative tools in an era besieged by misinformation. Fake news is a form of misleading information delivered as reliable news. It is mainly made up of intentionally manipulating public opinion, decision bias, and exploiting general credulity. Various supervised learning-based fake news detection and classifications only focus on the semantic values due to their subjectivity in the current context. Sentiment analysis is also a common interpretation mechanism of information mining. This research explores the role of sentiment analysis in the context of fake news detection. Sentiment analysis, a facet of natural language processing, delves into the nuanced sentiments within the text, unveiling hidden narratives and differentiating between authentic reporting and carefully crafted deception. The study employs various sentiment reasoning models, including VADER, TextBlob, and Roberta, focusing on comparative analysis. The VADER model, complemented by a Bag of Words approach, emerges as the most effective, outperforming, compared to TextBlob and RoBERTa. Especially BERT sentiment reasoner model underperformed with uneven distribution in this fake news domain. The best VADER sentiments are taken for the transitions of sequential neural network architectures such as Simple Neural Network (SNN), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) featuring Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM). The LSTM model captures intricate patterns, dependencies, and contextual information. Evaluation metrics, encompassing accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score, provide a comprehensive understanding of models' performance. The RNN LSTM performed well compared to the other sequential models. It primely emphasised the multifaceted landscape of sentiment analysis, presenting a robust strategy for combating the proliferation of fake news in an information-abundant age. Combining Sentiment Reasoning in VADER and RNN LSTM presents a robust strategy for fake news detection as a novel approach in the evolving field of misinformation detection. The study discusses the importance of sentiment reasoning for the fake news datasets contributing in terms of the advancement in fake news classification and detection.