FakedBits- Detecting Fake Information on Social Platforms using Multi-Modal Features

Abstract

Social media play a significant role in communicating information across the globe, connecting with loved ones, getting the news, communicating ideas, etc. However, a group of people uses social media to spread fake information, which has a bad impact on society. Therefore, minimizing fake news and its detection are the two primary challenges that need to be addressed. This paper presents a multi-modal deep learning technique to address the above challenges. The proposed modal can use and process visual and textual features. Therefore, it has the ability to detect fake information from visual and textual data. We used EfficientNet-B0 and a sentence transformer, respectively, for detecting counterfeit images and for textural learning. Feature embedding is performed at individual channels, whilst fusion is done at the last classification layer. The late fusion is applied intentionally to mitigate the noisy data that are generated by multi-modalities. Extensive experiments are conducted, and performance is evaluated against state-of-the-art methods. Three real-world benchmark datasets, such as MediaEval (Twitter), Weibo, and Fakeddit, are used for experimentation. Result reveals that the proposed modal outperformed the state-of-the-art methods and achieved an accuracy of 86.48%, 82.50%, and 88.80%, respectively, for MediaEval (Twitter), Weibo, and Fakeddit datasets.