Innovative multi objective optimization based automatic fake news detection

Abstract

With the digital revolution, access to information is expanding day by day and individuals can access information quickly through the internet and social media platforms. However, in most cases, there is no mechanism in place to evaluate the accuracy of news that spreads rapidly on social media. This increases the potential for fake news to mislead both individuals and society. In order to minimize the negative effects of fake news, it has become a critical necessity to detect them quickly and effectively. Metaheuristic methods can provide more effective solutions in fake news detection compared to traditional methods. Especially in small datasets, metaheuristics are known to produce faster and more effective solutions than artificial intelligence and machine learning based methods. In the literature, the majority of fake news detection studies have focused on the optimization of a single criterion. In this study, unlike other studies, a method that enables simultaneous optimization of two criteria (precision and recall) in fake news detection is developed. In the proposed approach, an innovative solution is presented by using the Crowding Distance Level method instead of the Crowding Distance method used in the standard Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm 2 (NSGA-2) algorithm. The proposed method is tested on four different datasets such as Covid-19, Syrian war daily news and FakeNewsNet (Gossipcop). The results show that the proposed method achieves high success especially on small datasets.