Automating fake news detection system using multi-level voting model

The issues of online fake news have attained an increasing eminence in the diffusion of shaping news stories online. Misleading or unreliable information in the form of videos, posts, articles, URLs is extensively disseminated through popular social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. As a result, editors and journalists are in need of new tools that can help them to pace up the verification process for the content that has been originated from social media. Motivated by the need for automated detection of fake news, the goal is to find out which classification model identifies phony features accurately using three feature extraction techniques, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF), Count-Vectorizer (CV) and Hashing-Vectorizer (HV). Also, in this paper, a novel multi-level voting ensemble model is proposed. The proposed system has been tested on three datasets using twelve classifiers. These ML classifiers are combined based on their false prediction ratio. It has been observed that the Passive Aggressive, Logistic Regression and Linear Support Vector Classifier (LinearSVC) individually perform best using TF-IDF, CV and HV feature extraction approaches, respectively, based on their performance metrics, whereas the proposed model outperforms the Passive Aggressive model by 0.8%, Logistic Regression model by 1.3%, LinearSVC model by 0.4% using TF-IDF, CV and HV, respectively. The proposed system can also be used to predict the fake content (textual form) from online social media websites.