Detecting fake news spreaders on twitter

Abstract

Nowadays, fake news is prevalent and too simple to propagate through social media, particularly during elections and pandemics like COVID-19. Several fake news stories have appeared on social media sites like LINE, Facebook, and Twitter after the COVID-19 epidemic throughout the world. Also, a lot of older individuals simply forward these communications without checking their veracity, which speeds up the dissemination of fake information. So, our goal is to identify fake news using machine learning. In this paper, we describe a supervised method that automatically gathers a sizable but noisy training dataset made up of a significant number of tweets. We will categorize tweets during collection into trustworthy and untrustworthy sources, then using the dataset to train a classifier. The categorization of fake and real tweets is the next classification objective for which we apply that classifier. We first demonstrate that real news is larger in size, shared on Twitter for a longer length of time, and shared by people with more followers than following. Second, we employed machine learning models like support vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF), and decision tree (DT), and we found out that the SVM is the best of all the models due to its best results and 99% accuracy.