Understanding the Use and Abuse of Social Media: Generalized Fake News Detection With a Multichannel Deep Neural Network

Abstract

Fake news has spread across social media platforms and with the ease of access, negative consequences have come with it on individuals and society. This issue has become a focus of interest among various research communities, including artificial intelligence (AI) researchers. Existing AI-based fake news detection techniques primarily make use of a 1-D convolutional neural network (1D-CNN) with unidirectional word embedding. We propose a multichannel deep convolutional neural network (CNN) with different kernel sizes and filters as an AI technique. Multiple embedding of the same dimension with different kernel sizes technically allows the news article to be processed at different resolutions of different n-grams at the same time. Different kernel sizes increase the learning ability of the proposed classification model. The proposed model determines how to integrate these interpretations (different n-grams) most suitably. Three real-world fake news datasets were used in experiments to validate the classification performance. The classification results showed that the proposed model has high accuracy in detecting fake news. Regardless of the dataset, the proposed model can be used for fake news detection in binary classification problems.