COVID-19 Fake News Detection Using Machine Learning Techniques: A Comparative Study

Abstract

Fake news has become one of the most serious issues in recent years, especially on social media. For example, during the covid-19 pandemic, a great deal of false information about the virus spread easily and quickly through the internet. In this area, researchers have given substantial answers to this problem utilizing various machine learning techniques. However, there are some gaps that need to be clarified. In the context of COVID-19 fake news detection, in this study, we present a comparison of four major machine learning algorithms: SVM, Nave Bayes, Logistic Regression, and Random Forest. We proposed four new machine learning models by combining these algorithms with two feature extraction techniques (TF-IDF and CountVectorizer). On three datasets, we tested the suggested models and analyzed their performance. According to the obtained results, we concluded that some properties of the used datasets can affect the obtained results. In addition, we find the best model overall.