NNPCov19: Artificial Neural Network-Based Propaganda Identification on Social Media in COVID-19 Era

Abstract

The latest trend of sharing information has evolved many concerns for the current researchers, which are working on computational social sciences. Online social network platforms have become a tool for sharing propagandistic information. This is being used as a lethal weapon in modern days to destabilize democracies and other political or religious events. The COVID-19 affected almost every corner of the world. Various propagandistic tweets were shared on Twitter during the peak time of COVID-19. In this paper, improved artificial neural network algorithm is proposed to classify tweets into propagandistic and nonpropagandistic class. The data are extracted using multiple ambiguous hashtags and are manually annotated into binary class. Hybrid feature engineering is being performed by combining “Term Frequency (TF)/Inverse Document Frequency (IDF),” “Bag of Words,” and Tweet Length. The proposed algorithm is compared with logistic regression, support vector machine, and multinomial Naive Bayes. Results showed that improved artificial neural network algorithm outperforms other machine learning algorithms by having 77.15% accuracy, 77% of recall, and 79% precision. In future, deep learning approaches like LSTM may be used for this classification task.