Title: A metaheuristic optimisation-based deep learning model for fake news detection in online social networks

Authors: Chandrakant Mallick; Sarojananda Mishra; Parimal Kumar Giri; Bijay Kumar Paikaray

Addresses: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Biju Patnaik University of Technology, Rourkela, Odisha, India ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indira Gandhi Institute of Technology, Sarang, Odisha, India ' Department of Computer Science and Information Technology, Gandhi Institute of Technological Advancement (GITA) Autonomous, Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India ' Center for Data Science, SOA University, Odisha, India

Abstract: The spread of fake news has become a societal problem. Most often, fake news spreads faster than real news and misleads society. Many works have been proposed in the literature using machine learning techniques to detect fake news, but developing a faster and more efficient model is still a challenging issue. Taking advantage of the deep neural network features of long- and short-term memory (LSTM) and metaheuristic optimisation algorithms, this paper proposes a Salp swarm algorithm-based optimised LSTM model to efficiently classify fake and real news in online social networks. To figure out the superiority of the model, it is experimentally demonstrated that the proposed model outperforms the LSTM optimised with other traditional optimisations. We tested the efficiency of the models on three datasets: the LIAR benchmark dataset, the ISOT dataset, and the news regarding the COVID-19 pandemic, and obtained accuracy of 97.89%, 86.49%, and 99.71%, respectively.

Keywords: fake news; social network; deep learning; BERT; LSTM; optimisation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJESDF.2024.140741

International Journal of Electronic Security and Digital Forensics, 2024 Vol.16 No.5, pp.533 - 556

Received: 01 Oct 2022
Accepted: 20 Apr 2023

Published online: 02 Sep 2024 *

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