Automated Detection of Misinformation: A Hybrid Approach for Fake News Detection

The rise of social media has transformed the landscape of news dissemination, presenting new challenges in combating the spread of fake news. This study addresses the automated detection of misinformation within written content, a task that has prompted extensive research efforts across various methodologies. We evaluate existing benchmarks, introduce a novel hybrid word embedding model, and implement a web framework for text classification. Our approach integrates traditional frequency–inverse document frequency (TF–IDF) methods with sophisticated feature extraction techniques, considering linguistic, psychological, morphological, and grammatical aspects of the text. Through a series of experiments on diverse datasets, applying transfer and incremental learning techniques, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our hybrid model in surpassing benchmarks and outperforming alternative experimental setups. Furthermore, our findings emphasize the importance of dataset alignment and balance in transfer learning, as well as the utility of incremental learning in maintaining high detection performance while reducing runtime. This research offers promising avenues for further advancements in fake news detection methodologies, with implications for future research and development in this critical domain.