Disinformation Classification Using Transformer based Machine Learning

Abstract

The proliferation of false information via social media has become an increasingly pressing problem. Digital means of communication and social media platforms facilitate the rapid spread of disinformation, which calls for the development of advanced techniques for identifying incorrect information. This dissertation endeavors to devise effective multimodal techniques for identifying fraudulent news, considering the noteworthy influence that deceptive stories have on society. The study proposes and evaluates multiple approaches, starting with a transformer-based model that uses word embeddings for accurate text classification. This model significantly outperforms baseline methods such as hybrid CNN and RNN, achieving higher accuracy. The dissertation also introduces a novel BERT-powered multimodal approach to fake news detection, combining textual data with extracted text from images to improve accuracy. By lever aging the strengths of the BERT-base-uncased model for text processing and integrating it with image text extraction via OCR, this approach calculates a confidence score indicating the likeli hood of news being real or fake. Rigorous training and evaluation show significant improvements in performance compared to state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, the study explores the complexities of multimodal fake news detection, integrat ing text, images, and videos into a unified framework. By employing BERT for textual analysis and CNN for visual data, the multimodal approach demonstrates superior performance over traditional models in handling multiple media formats. Comprehensive evaluations using datasets such as ISOT and MediaEval 2016 confirm the robustness and adaptability of these methods in combating the spread of fake news. This dissertation contributes valuable insights to fake news detection, highlighting the effec tiveness of transformer-based models, emotion-aware classifiers, and multimodal frameworks. The findings provide robust solutions for detecting misinformation across diverse platforms and data types, offering a path forward for future research in this critical area.