Fake or real news about COVID-19? Pretrained transformer model to detect potential misleading news

The World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus disease 2019 a pandemic on March 11, 2020. Along with the coronavirus pandemic, a new crisis has emerged, characterized by widespread fear and panic caused by a lack of information or, in some cases, outright fake messages. In these circumstances, Twitter is one of the most eminent and trusted social media platforms. Fake tweets, on the other hand, are challenging to detect and differentiate. The primary goal of this paper is to educate society about the importance of accurate information and prevent the spread of fake information. This paper has investigated COVID-19 fake data from various social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. The objective of this paper is to categorize given tweets as either fake or real news. The authors have tested various deep learning models on the COVID-19 fake dataset. Finally, the CT-BERT and RoBERTa deep learning models outperformed other deep learning models like BERT, BERTweet, AlBERT, and DistlBERT. The proposed ensemble deep learning architecture outperformed CT-BERT and RoBERTa on the COVID-19 fake news dataset using the multiplicative fusion technique. The proposed model’s performance in this technique was determined by the multiplicative product of the final predictive values of CT-BERT and RoBERTa. This technique overcomes the disadvantage of these CT-BERT and RoBERTa models’ incorrect predictive nature. The proposed architecture outperforms both well-known ML and DL models, with 98.88% accuracy and a 98.93% F1-score.