Fake News Detection: An Effective Content-Based Approach Using Machine Learning Techniques

Fake news is any information fabricated to mislead readers to spread an idea for certain gains (usually political or financial). In today's world, accessing and sharing information is very fast and almost free. Internet users are growing significantly than ever before. Therefore, online platforms are perfect grounds to spread information to a broader section of society. What could circulate between a relative few can now circulate globally overnight. This advantage also marked the increase in the number of fake news attacks by its users, which is unsuitable for a healthy society. Therefore, there is a need for good algorithms to identify and take down fake information as soon as they appear. This paper aims at solving the problem by automating the process of identifying fake news using its content. Evaluation metrics like the accuracy of correct classification, precision, recall and f1-score assess the performance of the approach. The machine learning approach achieved its best performance with 96.7 percentage accuracy, 96.2 percentage precision, 97.5 percentage recall and 96.9 percentage f1 score on the ISOT dataset.