A Pinnacle Technique for Detection of COVID-19 Fake News in Social Media

Abstract

Today the world is gripped with fear of the most infectious disease which was caused by a newly discovered virus namely corona and thus termed as COVID-19. This is a large group of viruses which severely affects humans. The world bears testimony to its contagious nature and rapidity of spreading the illness. 50l people got infected and 30l people died due to this pandemic all around the world. This made a wide impact for people to fear the epidemic around them. The death rate of male is more compared to female. This Pandemic news has caught the attention of the world and gained its momentum in almost all the media platforms. There was an array of creating and spreading of true as well as fake news about COVID-19 in the social media, which has become popular and a major concern to the general public who access it. Spreading such hot news in social media has become a new trend in acquiring familiarity and fan base. At the time it is undeniable that spreading of such fake news in and around creates lots of confusion and fear to the public. To stop all such rumors detection of fake news has become utmost important. To effectively detect the fake news in social media the emerging machine learning classification algorithms can be an appropriate method to frame the model. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, we investigated and implemented by collecting the training data and trained a machine learning model by using various machine learning algorithms to automatically detect the fake news about the Corona Virus. The machine learning algorithm used in this investigation is Naïve Bayes classifier and Random forest classification algorithm for the best results. A separate model for each classifier is created after the data preparation and feature extraction Techniques. The results obtained are compared and examined accurately to evaluate the accurate model. Our experiments on a benchmark dataset with random forest classification model showed a promising results with an overall accuracy of 94.06%. This experimental evaluation will prevent the general public to keep themselves out of their fear and to know and understand the impact of fast-spreading as well as misleading fake news.