COVID-19 Fake News Detection on Social Media

ABSTRACT

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, social media plays an important role to circulate pandemic news around the world. Some malevolent users may take an advantage of this and spread fake news to attract people for business and research purposes. In this paper, we take an approach by applying existing machine learning algorithms to detect fake news in social media and show a comparison of their performances. In our study, the support vector classifier (SVC) outperforms the rest of the classifiers based on different statistical metrics. Therefore, the SVC classifier has been considered as our proposed classifier model to identify fake COVID-19 news in social media. Two word clouds have also been generated based on the appearance of words in the news that shows an insignificant difference between true and fake news. © 2021 IEEE.