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Fake News Detection System by Manish Verma 16scse111009

The document discusses the challenges of detecting fake news on social media, highlighting its potential negative impacts on society and the need for effective detection algorithms. It reviews existing methodologies, evaluation metrics, and the scale of the fake news problem in India, including notable examples and the lack of specific laws to combat it. The document emphasizes the importance of utilizing auxiliary information and advanced techniques to improve detection accuracy in the face of evolving misinformation tactics.

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Manish Verma
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33 views7 pages

Fake News Detection System by Manish Verma 16scse111009

The document discusses the challenges of detecting fake news on social media, highlighting its potential negative impacts on society and the need for effective detection algorithms. It reviews existing methodologies, evaluation metrics, and the scale of the fake news problem in India, including notable examples and the lack of specific laws to combat it. The document emphasizes the importance of utilizing auxiliary information and advanced techniques to improve detection accuracy in the face of evolving misinformation tactics.

Uploaded by

Manish Verma
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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FAKE NEWS DETECTION SYSTEM

BY- MANISH VERMA


16SCSE111009
1613111014
MCA – 5TH SEM

PROBLEM STATEMENT & FEASIBILITY STUDY –


Social media for news consumption is a double-edged sword. On the one hand,
its low cost, easy access, and rapid dissemination of information lead people to
seek out and consume news from social media. On the other hand, it enables
the wide spread of “fake news”, i.e., low quality news with intentionally false
information. The extensive spread of fake news has the potential for extremely
negative impacts on individuals and society. Therefore, fake news detection on
social media has recently become an emerging research that is attracting
tremendous attention. Fake news detection on social media presents unique
characteristics and challenges that make existing detection algorithms from
traditional news media ineffective or not applicable. First, fake news is
intentionally written to mislead readers to believe false information, which
makes it difficult and nontrivial to detect based on news content; therefore,
we need to include auxiliary information, such as user social engagements on
social media, to help make a determination. Second, exploiting this auxiliary
information is challenging in and of itself as users’ social engagements with
fake news produce data that is big, incomplete, unstructured, and noisy.
Because the issue of fake news detection on social media is both
challenging and relevant, we conducted this survey to further facilitate
research on the problem. In this survey, we present a comprehensive
review of detecting fake news on social media, including fake news
characterizations on psychology and social theories, existing algorithms
from a data mining perspective, evaluation metrics and representative
datasets.
Fake news has existed since the dawn of the printing press but in the age of
internet and social media, it has found a tremendous application. Manipulation
of algorithms of social media and search engines—to reach large audiences
and mislead news consumers is a global trend now. Fake video clips, news
stories with morphed media logos, bots, paid commentators for favourable
online reputation (troll farm) have become very common. Governments are
using the threat of fake news to clamp down on free speech. Globally, Snopes
and in India Social Media Hoax Slayer, AltNews are some forums which expose
fake news. Editor of Postcard News (India) was arrested for spreading
falsehoods aimed at creating communal discord. Russia has been accused of
manipulating the 2016 US elections through bots and fake news; it is a well-
documented case of inter-national online manipulation. Russian interference
in elections in the US and West Europe has been the biggest content
manipulation concern in recent years. Facebook in the light of mounting
criticism in the wake of Cambridge Analytica data scandal has announced that
it will fight fake news and political misinformation, with new controls intended
to ensure authenticity and transparency among advertisers and publishers.

Background
Detecting fake news on social media poses several new and challenging
research problems. Though fake news itself is not a new problem–nations or
groups have been using the news media to execute propaganda or influence
operations for centuries–the rise of web-generated news on social media
makes fake news a more powerful force that challenges traditional journalistic
norms. There are several characteristics of this problem that make it uniquely
challenging for automated detection. First, fake news is intentionally written to
mislead readers, which makes it nontrivial to detect simply based on news
content. The content of fake news is rather diverse in terms of topics, styles
and media platforms, and fake news attempts to distort truth with diverse
linguistic styles while simultaneously mocking true news. For example, fake
news may cite true evidence within the in-correct context to support a non-
factual claim. Thus, existing hand-crafted and data-specific textual features are
generally not sufficient for fake news detection. Other auxiliary information
must also be applied to improve detection, such as knowledge base and user
social engagements. Second, exploiting this auxiliary information actually leads
to another critical challenge: the quality of the data itself. Fake news is usually
related to newly emerging, time-critical events, which may not have been
properly verified by existing knowledge bases due to the lack of corroborating
evidence or claims. In addition, users’ social engagements with fake news
produce data that is big, incomplete, unstructured, and noisy. Effective
methods to differentiate credible users, extract useful post features and
exploit network interactions are an open area of research and need further
investigations.

Methodology
Step 1: Feature Extraction
News content features describe the meta information related to a piece of
news. A list of representative news content attributes are listed below:
• Source: Author or publisher of the news article
• Headline: Short title text that aims to catch the attention of readers and
describes the main topic of the article
• Body Text: Main text that elaborates the details of the news story; there is
usually a major claim that is specifically highlighted and that shapes the angle
of the publisher
• Image/Video: Part of the body content of a news article that provides visual
cues to frame the story. Based on these raw content attributes, different kinds
of feature representations can be built to extract discriminative characteristics
of fake news. Typically, the news content we are looking at will mostly be
linguistic-based and visual-based.
Step2: Model Construction
Since fake news attempts to spread false claims in news content, the most
straightforward means of detecting it is to check the truthfulness of major
claims in a news article to decide the news veracity. Knowledge-based
approaches aim to use external sources to fact-check proposed claims in news
content. The goal of fact-checking is to assign a truth value to a claim in a
particular context. Fact-checking has attracted increasing attention, and many
efforts have been made to develop a feasible automated fact-checking system.
Existing fact-checking approaches can be categorized as expert-oriented,
crowdsourcing-oriented, and computational-oriented.
Experimental Design
Datasets: Online news can be collected from different sources, such as news
agency homepages, search engines, and social media websites. However,
manually determining the veracity of news is a challenging task, usually
requiring annotators with domain expertise who performs careful analysis of
claims and additional evidence, context, and reports from authoritative
sources. Generally, news data with annotations can be gathered in the
following ways: Expert journalists, Fact-checking websites, Industry detectors,
and Crowd-sourced workers

Evaluation Metrics: evaluate the performance of algorithms for fake news


detection problem, various evaluation metrics have been used. In this
subsection, we review the most widely used metrics for fake news detection.
Most existing approaches consider the fake news problem as a classification
problem that predicts whether a news article is fake or not:
• True Positive (TP): when predicted fake news pieces are actually annotated
as fake news;
• True Negative (TN): when predicted true news pieces are actually annotated
as true news;
• False Negative (FN): when predicted true news pieces are actually annotated
as fake news;
• False Positive (FP): when predicted fake news pieces are actually annotated
as true news.
By formulating this as a classification problem, we can define following
metrics,
1. Precision=|T P||T P|+|F P|
2. Recall=|T P||T P|+|F N|
3. F1 = 2·Precisionn Recall Precision +Recall
4. Accuracy=|T P|+|T N||T P|+|TN|+|F P|+|F N|
These metrics are commonly used in the machine learning community and
enable us to evaluate the performance of a classifier from different
perspectives. Specifically, accuracy measures the similarity between predicted
fake news and real fake news.

The Scale of the Problem in India

• Misinformation and disinformation spread in media is becoming a serious


social challenge. It is leading to the poisonous atmosphere on the web and
causing riots and lynchings on the road.
• In the age of the internet (WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter,) it is a serious
problem as rumours, morphed images, click-baits, motivated stories,
unverified information, planted stories for various interests spread easily
among 35 crore internet users in India.
• There have been many instances of online rumours leading to killings of
innocent people. In some cases, ministers have deleted tweets after realizing
the fake news which they shared earlier.
• In India, WhatsApp is the platform most vulnerable to fake news. Millions of
Indians (a vast percentage is uneducated) using mobile internet innocently
forwarding ‘good morning’ messages every day are seen as most vulnerable to
fake news.
• In the recent Karnataka Assembly elections (2018) fake news about rival
parties and candidates flooded the media.
• It may not be a coincidence that India has the highest number of selfie
deaths (person dying while trying to take a selfie) in the world (76 deaths out
of 127 reported globally between March 2014 and September 2016). Use and
abuse of mobile and internet remain a concern.

Fake News Damages: Popular Examples from India

• Muzzafarnagar riots of 2013: fake video fuelled communal passions


• UNESCO has declared ‘Jana Gana Mana’ best national anthem in the world
(WhatsApp)
• Dawood properties worth Rs 15000 Cr seized in Dubai (Zee News, ABP)
• President Kovind makes Twitter debut; gains 3 million followers in one hour
(Republic, Zee news, TOI etc.)
• Nostradamus had predicted the rise of supreme leader Narendus (Zee News)
• Dying Woman Molested, Video shows (The Hindu)
• Fatwa in Saudi Arabia; Men can eat wives when hungry (AajTak)
• GPS tracking nanochip in 2000 Rupee notes (Nov 2016)
• Salt Shortage rumours (Nov 2016)
• Child kidnapping rumours lead to lynchings by a mob in Jharkhand 2/4
• Minister using a Russian photo to show LED-electrification of streets
• Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) annual report used a picture of Spain-
Morocco border to show Indian border floodlighting
• Missing JNU student Najeeb Ahmed has joined the ISIS

Laws and Regulation to Curb Fake News in India

• There is no specific law against fake news in India. Free publication of news
flows from Article 19 of the Constitution guaranteeing freedom of speech.
• Press Council of India, a regulatory body, can warn, admonish or censure the
newspaper, the news agency, the editor or the journalist or disapprove the
conduct of the editor or the journalist if it finds that a newspaper or a news
agency has violated journalistic ethics.
• News Broadcasters Association (NBA) represents the private television news
and current affairs broadcasters. The self-regulatory body probes complaints
against electronic media.
• Indian Broadcast Foundation (IBF) also looks into the complaints against
contents aired by channels.
• Broadcasting Content Complaint Council (BCCC) admits complaints against TV
broadcasters for objectionable TV content and fake news.
• Indian Penal Code (IPC) has certain sections which could curb fake news:
Sections 153 (wantonly giving provocation with intent to cause riot) and 295
(injuring or defiling place of worship with intent to insult the religion of any
class) can be invoked to guard against fake news.
• Section 66 in The Information Technology Act, 2000: If any person,
dishonestly or fraudulently, does any act referred to in section 43 (damage to
computer, computer system), he shall be punishable with imprisonment for a
term which may extend to three years or with fine which may extend to five
lakh rupees or with both.
• Civil or Criminal Case for Defamation is another resort against fake news for
individuals and groups hurt by the fake news. IPC Section 499 (defamation) and
500 (whoever defames another shall be punished with simple imprisonment
for a term which may extend to two years, or with fine, or with both) provide
for a defamation suit.

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