After the advent of Web, the number of people who abandoned traditional media channels and started receiving news only through social media has increased. However, this caused an increase of the spread of fake news due to the ease of sharing information. The consequences are various, with one of the main ones being the possible attempts to manipulate public opinion for elections or promotion of movements that can damage rule of law or the institutions that represent it. The objective of this work is to perform fake news detection using Distributed Representations and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). Although fake news detection using RNNs has been already explored in the literature, there is little research on the processing of texts in Portuguese language, which is the focus of this work. For this purpose, distributed representations from texts are generated with three different algorithms (fastText, GloVe and word2vec) and used as input features for a Long Short-term Memory Network (LSTM). The approach is evaluated using a publicly available labelled news dataset. The proposed approach shows promising results for all the three distributed representation methods for feature extraction, with the combination word2vec+LSTM providing the best results. The results of the proposed approach shows a better classification performance when compared to simple architectures, while similar results are obtained when the approach is compared to deeper architectures or more complex methods.
Fake News Detection Using a Blend of Neural Networks: An Application of Deep Learning