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Item The Rising Tide of Fake News and How to Tackle It: Quickfix Solutions Will only Create More Problems(The Times of India, 2021-02-03) Chouhan, Gajendra SinghFake news affects everyone and everything. It comes to us in myriad shades: viral rumors, morphed images, conspiracy theories, and unconfirmed tweets and posts. There is no easy way out to curb its reach. We may blame young people who are not media literate, or social media that is largely untapped by any regulation or responsibility. The author offers three takeaways to overcome present misinformation landscape: people, praxis and policy. Taken together these three areas, the society would much balanced, clean and informedItem Infodemic of Fake News: Hope for Print(University News, 2020-12) Chouhan, Gajendra SinghThe media reporting of the COVID-19 pandemic has risen the critical questions about the future of journalism. Getting a clear, accurate information of disease is often difficult, as most of us do not know that we are dealing with a fake news, forwarding a photoshopped image or watching a concocted video. Social media is overwhelmed by lots of self-proclaimed experts’ advises, precautions and treatments to protect oneself from the coronavirus. Amid these misleading claims circulating online, it is hard to know what is real and what is fake. The author explores the possibilities of looking through the social media from the perspectives and practices of print media and makes a strong pitching that the robust editorial behavior and standard ethical print culture could salvage the menace of misinformation in civic society. The dying print may still be a torchbearer to a fast-paced, interactive social media and help it gain credibility and acceptance form the masses. There is a serious concern that digital connectivity is widespread and untapped posing an infodemic of inaccurate information about COVID-19. It could also a moment of redemption for social media to manage this misinformation and follow print media to check the proliferation of misinformation on their platforms.Item Understanding the Use and Abuse of Social Media: Generalized Fake News Detection With a Multichannel Deep Neural Network(IEEE, 2022-11) Chamola, VinayFake 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 problemsItem Multiclass Fake News Detection using Ensemble Machine Learning(IEEE, 2019) Narang, PratikOver the past few years, fake news and its influence have become a growing cause of concern in terms of debate and public discussions. Due to the availability of the Internet, a lot of user-generated content is produced across the globe in a single day using various social media platforms. Nowadays, it has become very easy to create fake news and propagate it worldwide within a short period of time. Despite receiving significant attention in the research community, fake news detection did not improve significantly due to insufficient context-specific news data. Most of the researchers have analyzed the fake news problem as a binary classification problem, but many more prediction classes exist. In this research work, experiments have been conducted using a tree-based Ensemble Machine Learning framework (Gradient Boosting) with optimized parameters combining content and context level features for fake news detection. Recently, adaptive boosting methods for classification problems have been derived as gradient descent algorithms. This formulation justifies key elements and parameters in the methods, which are chosen to optimize a single common objective function. Experiments are conducted using a multi-class dataset (FNC) and various machine learning models are used for classification. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the ensemble framework compared to existing benchmark results. Using the Gradient Boosting algorithm (an ensemble machine learning framework), we achieved an accuracy of 86% for multi-class classification of fake news having four classes.Item A Hybrid Model for Effective Fake News Detection with a Novel COVID-19 Dataset(CITEPRESS, 2021) Narang, PratikDue to the increasing number of users in social media, news articles can be quickly published or share among users without knowing its credibility and authenticity. Fast spreading of fake news articles using different social media platforms can create inestimable harm to society. These actions could seriously jeopardize the reliability of news media platforms. So it is imperative to prevent such fraudulent activities to foster the credibility of such social media platforms. An efficient automated tool is a primary necessity to detect such misleading articles. Considering the issues mentioned earlier, in this paper, we propose a hybrid model using multiple branches of the convolutional neural network (CNN) with Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) layers with different kernel sizes and filters. To make our model deep, which consists of three dense layers to extract more powerful features automatically. In this research, we have created a dataset (FN-COV) collecting 69976 fake and real news articles during the pandemic of COVID-19 with tags like social-distancing, covid19, and quarantine. We have validated the performance of our proposed model with one more real-time fake news dataset: PHEME. The capability of combined kernels and layers of our C-LSTM network is lucrative towards both the datasets. With our proposed model, we achieved an accuracy of 91.88% with PHEME, which is higher as compared to existing models and 98.62% with FN-COV dataset.Item MCNNet: Generalizing Fake News Detection with a Multichannel Convolutional Neural Network using a Novel COVID-19 Dataset(ACM Digital Library, 2021-01) Narang, PratikDuring the pandemic of COVID-19, the propagation of fake news is spreading like wildfire on social media. Such fake news articles have created confusion among people and serious social disruptions as well. To detect such news articles effectively, we propose a generalized classification model (MCNNet) having the power of learning across different kernel-sized convolutional layers in different parallel channel network. The capability of MCNNet is lucrative towards any real-world fake news dataset. Experimental results have demonstrated the performance of our model with different real-world fake news datasets.Item FNDNet – A deep convolutional neural network for fake news detection(Elsevier, 2020-06) Narang, PratikWith the increasing popularity of social media and web-based forums, the distribution of fake news has become a major threat to various sectors and agencies. This has abated trust in the media, leaving readers in a state of perplexity. There exists an enormous assemblage of research on the theme of Artificial Intelligence (AI) strategies for fake news detection. In the past, much of the focus has been given on classifying online reviews and freely accessible online social networking-based posts. In this work, we propose a deep convolutional neural network (FNDNet) for fake news detection. Instead of relying on hand-crafted features, our model (FNDNet) is designed to automatically learn the discriminatory features for fake news classification through multiple hidden layers built in the deep neural network. We create a deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to extract several features at each layer. We compare the performance of the proposed approach with several baseline models. Benchmarked datasets were used to train and test the model, and the proposed model achieved state-of-the-art results with an accuracy of 98.36% on the test data. Various performance evaluation parameters such as Wilcoxon, false positive, true negative, precision, recall, F1, and accuracy, etc. were used to validate the results. These results demonstrate significant improvements in the area of fake news detection as compared to existing state-of-the-art results and affirm the potential of our approach for classifying fake news on social media. This research will assist researchers in broadening the understanding of the applicability of CNN-based deep models for fake news detection.Item DeepFakE: improving fake news detection using tensor decomposition-based deep neural network(Springer, 2020-05) Narang, PratikSocial media platforms have simplified the sharing of information, which includes news as well, as compared to traditional ways. The ease of access and sharing the data with the revolution in mobile technology has led to the proliferation of fake news. Fake news has the potential to manipulate public opinions and hence, may harm society. Thus, it is necessary to examine the credibility and authenticity of the news articles being shared on social media. Nowadays, the problem of fake news has gained massive attention from research communities and needed an optimal solution with high efficiency and low efficacy. Existing detection methods are based on either news-content or social-context using user-based features as an individual. In this paper, the content of the news article and the existence of echo chambers (community of social media-based users sharing the same opinions) in the social network are taken into account for fake news detection. A tensor representing social context (correlation between user profiles on social media and news articles) is formed by combining the news, user and community information. The news content is fused with the tensor, and coupled matrix-tensor factorization is employed to get a representation of both news content and social context. The proposed method has been tested on a real-world dataset: BuzzFeed. The factors obtained after decomposition have been used as features for news classification. An ensemble machine learning classifier (XGBoost) and a deep neural network model (DeepFakE) are employed for the task of classification. Our proposed model (DeepFakE) outperforms with the existing fake news detection methods by applying deep learning on combined news content and social context-based features as an echo-chamber.Item FakeBERT: Fake news detection in social media with a BERT-based deep learning approach(Springer, 2021-01) Narang, PratikIn the modern era of computing, the news ecosystem has transformed from old traditional print media to social media outlets. Social media platforms allow us to consume news much faster, with less restricted editing results in the spread of fake news at an incredible pace and scale. In recent researches, many useful methods for fake news detection employ sequential neural networks to encode news content and social context-level information where the text sequence was analyzed in a unidirectional way. Therefore, a bidirectional training approach is a priority for modelling the relevant information of fake news that is capable of improving the classification performance with the ability to capture semantic and long-distance dependencies in sentences. In this paper, we propose a BERT-based (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) deep learning approach (FakeBERT) by combining different parallel blocks of the single-layer deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) having different kernel sizes and filters with the BERT. Such a combination is useful to handle ambiguity, which is the greatest challenge to natural language understanding. Classification results demonstrate that our proposed model (FakeBERT) outperforms the existing models with an accuracy of 98.90%.Item EchoFakeD: improving fake news detection in social media with an efficient deep neural network(Springer, 2021-01) Narang, PratikThe increasing popularity of social media platforms has simplified the sharing of news articles that have led to the explosion in fake news. With the emergence of fake news at a very rapid rate, a serious concern has produced in our society because of enormous fake content dissemination. The quality of the news content is questionable and there exists a necessity for an automated tool for the detection. Existing studies primarily focus on utilizing information extracted from the news content. We suggest that user-based engagements and the context related group of people (echo-chamber) sharing the same opinions can play a vital role in the fake news detection. Hence, in this paper, we have focused on both the content of the news article and the existence of echo chambers in the social network for fake news detection. Standard factorization methods for fake news detection have limited effectiveness due to their unsupervised nature and primarily employed with traditional machine learning models. To design an effective deep learning model with tensor factorization approach is the priority. In our approach, the news content is fused with the tensor following a coupled matrix–tensor factorization method to get a latent representation of both news content as well as social context. We have designed our model with a different number of filters across each dense layer along with dropout. To classify on news content and social context-based information individually as well as in combination, a deep neural network (our proposed model) was employed with optimal hyper-parameters. The performance of our proposed approach has been validated on a real-world fake news dataset: BuzzFeed and PolitiFact. Classification results have demonstrated that our proposed model (EchoFakeD) outperforms existing and appropriate baselines for fake news detection and achieved a validation accuracy of 92.30%. These results have shown significant improvements over the existing state-of-the-art models in the area of fake news detection and affirm the potential use of the technique for classifying fake news.