Arabic Fake News Detection Using Deep Learning

Nowadays, an unprecedented number of users interact through social media platforms and generate a massive amount of content due to the explosion of online communication. However, because user-generated content is unregulated, it may contain offensive content such as fake news, insults, and harassment phrases. The identification of fake news and rumors and their dissemination on social media has become a critical requirement. They have adverse effects on users, businesses, enterprises, and even political regimes and governments. State of the art has tackled the English language for news and used feature-based algorithms. This paper proposes a model architecture to detect fake news in the Arabic language by using only textual features. Machine learning and deep learning algorithms were used. The deep learning models are used depending on conventional neural nets (CNN), long short-term memory (LSTM), bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM), CNN+LSTM, and CNN + BiLSTM. Three datasets were used in the experiments, each containing the textual content of Arabic news articles; one of them is real-life data. The results indicate that the BiLSTM model outperforms the other models regarding accuracy rate when both simple data split and recursive training modes are used in the training process.