Tweet Credibility Detection for COVID-19 Tweets using Text and User Content Features

Abstract

The deadly COVID-19 pandemic is currently sweeping the globe, and millions of people have been exposed to false information about the disease, its remedies, prevention, and origins. During such perilous times, the propagation of fake news and misinformation can have serious implications, causing widespread panic and exacerbating the pandemic's threat. This increasing threat factor has given rise to considerable research challenges. This article is mainly concerned about fake news identification and experimentation is specifically performed considering COVID-19 fake news as a case study. Fake news is spread intentionally to mislead the people and therefore we need to identify user’s involvement and it’s correlation with additional features. The aim of this research is to develop a model that can predict the essence of a tweet given as an input with the help of multiple features. Our strategy is to make use of the tweet's text as well as the user's metadata and develops a model using natural processing technique and deep learning method. In this process, we have analyzed the behavior of the accounts, observed the impact of the various factors that can lead to fake news. The experimental analysis shows that hybrid model with text and content features have generated a benchmark result than the existing state of art techniques. We have obtained a best F1-score of 0.976 during the experimentation.