Stance-Based Fake News Identification on Social Media with Hybrid CNN and RNN-LSTM Models

Abstract

Today, fake news can be readily generated and disseminated via social media platforms. Misinformation and hoaxes propagated via online social media or traditional news media are commonly referred to as fake news. Stance-based fake news is based on the opinions of an audience rather than providing correct facts. This study presents a hybrid model focusing on the CNN model and RNN-LSTM model to identify fake news. A balanced dataset of 216k news items called ‘SherLock-FakeNewsNet’ is explored throughout the study resulting in the proposed hybrid model. The NLTK toolkit is utilized to perform some noise reduction. After that, the Keras tokenizer and pre-processor are used for the tokenization and pre-processing steps. Next, the text data is fitted and represented using pre-trained GloVe word embeddings. CNN model is applied with Conv1D layers and MaxPooling layers to extract higher-level features of the text. Following this, to detect the longer context of the given text and to capture interdependencies among word sequences LSTM units are employed in the RNN model. Dropout layers are carefully chosen to reduce overfitting in the final hybrid model. The proposed hybrid model achieves the highest accuracy rate of 92% by outperforming most of the conventional models today with an average Precision of 91%, Recall of 91%, and F1-Score of 91% using an Adam optimizer and a Binary Cross-Entropy loss function. Based on the five experiments performed in the study, we have presented the results by comparing our proposed hybrid model with five related datasets.