Fake News Classification: A Quantitative Research Description

Social media can render content circulating to reach millions with a knack to influence people, despite the questionable authencity of the facts. Internet sources are the most convenient and easy approach to obtain any information these days. Fake news has become the topic of interest for academicians and the rest of society. This kind of propaganda has the power to influence the general perception, offering political groups the ability to control the results of democratic affairs such as elections. Automatic identification of fake news has emerged as one of the significant problems due to the high risks involved. It is challenging in a way because of the complexity levels of accurately interpreting the data. An extensive search has already been performed on English language news data. Our work presents a comparative analysis of fake news classifiers on the low resource Bengali language ‘ban fake news’ dataset from Kaggle. The analysis presented compares deep learning techniques such as LSTM (Long short-term Memory) and BiLSTM (Bi-directional Long short-term Memory) and machine learning methods like Naive Bayes, Passive Aggressive Classifier (PAC), and Random Forest. The comparison has been drawn based on classification metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score. The deep learning method BiLSTM shows 55.92% accuracy while Random Forest, in contrast, has outperformed all the other methods with an accuracy of 62.37%. The work presented in this paper sets a basis for researchers to select the optimum classifiers for their approach towards fake news detection.