Abstract
Since the emergence of the Covid-19, both factual and false information about the new virus has been disseminated. Fake news harms societies and must be combated. This research aims to identify Arabic fake news tweets and classify them into six categories: entertainment, health, politics, religious, social, and sports. The study also aims to uncover patterns in the spread of Arabic fake news associated with the Covid-19 pandemic. The researchers created an Arabic dictionary and used text classification based on a rule-based system to detect and categorize fake news. A dataset consisting of 5 million tweets was analyzed. The developed model achieves an overall accuracy of 78.1% with 70% precision and 98%recall. The model detected more than 26006 fake news tweets. Interestingly we found an association between the number of fake news tweets and dates. The result demonstrates that as more information and knowledge about Covid-19 become available over time, people's awareness increase, while the number of fake news tweets decreases. The categorization of false news indicates that the social category was highest in all Arab countries except Palestine, Qatar, Yemen, and Algeria. Conversely, fake news related to the entertainment category was the weakest dissemination in most Arab countries.
Highlights
Social media networks are increasingly being used as a source of information
This research aims to answer the following two questions: how to detect Arabic fake news about Covid-19 on Twitter through the use of rule-based systems, and what are the current trends of fake news diffusion during the pandemic in the Arab region?
Our detection model is based on text classification that depends on rule-based systems to classify the tweets as fake or not fake news
Summary
Social media networks are increasingly being used as a source of information. Easy access, and speed of information delivery encourage people to use it as a searching tool to obtain information. The widespread use of social media around the world provides a perfect setting for the dissemination of fake news. Fake news is described as lowquality news [1] or false news purposely broadcast to divert people away from true news and facts [2]. It is considered to be one of the most dangerous weapons capable of bringing harm to both society and people [3]. Its prevalence increases during crises as crises represent a perfect time for spreading fake news and rumors, especially when knowledge of a problem is limited and ambiguous
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