A Novel Approach for Detection of Fake News on Social Media Using Metaheuristic Optimization Algorithms

Deceptive content is becoming increasingly dangerous, such as fake news created by social media users. Individuals and society have been affected negatively by the spread of low-quality news on social media. The fake and real news needs to be detected to eliminate the disadvantages of social media. This paper proposes a novel approach for fake news detection (FND) problem on social media. Applying this approach, FND problem has been considered as an optimization problem for the first time and two metaheuristic algorithms, the Grey Wolf Optimization (GWO) and Salp Swarm Optimization (SSO) have been adapted to the FND problem for the first time as well. The proposed FND approach consists of three stages. The first stage is data preprocessing. The second stage is adapting GWO and SSO for construction of a novel FND model. The last stage consists of using proposed FND model for testing. The proposed approach has been evaluated using three different real-world datasets. The results have been compared with seven supervised artificial intelligence algorithms. The results show GWO algorithm has the best performance in comparison with SSO algorithm and the other artificial intelligence algorithms. GWO seems to be efficiently used for solving different types of social media problems.