Veracity Assessment of Multimedia Facebook Posts for Infodemic Symptom Detection using Bi-modal Unsupervised Machine Learning Approach

Abstract: Ascertaining the truthfulness and trustworthiness of information posted on social media has been challenging with the proliferation of unsubstantiated, misleading, and inciting news, with different intents by purveyors. Unlike the traditional media with some level of regulations, user-generated posts on social networks does not pass through censorships in order to establish the truism of news items hence the need to be cautious of posted information on the networks. The lingering issue of recent suspension of Twitter microblogging site by the Nigerian government and the consequent decision to regulate social network operations in the country similarly centers on the subject of social media dependability for legitimate social engagements by millions of savvy Nigerian users. Whereas existing models in literature have proposed state-of-the-arts, this study seeks to improve on obtainable studies with a bi-modal machine learning methodology that indicate symptoms of infodemic social media posts. Using a multimedia facebook corpus, an unsupervised natural language processor, Inception v3 model, coupled with a hierarchical clustering network, is deployed for the duo of image and text sentiment analytics. Experimental result uniquely identified infodemic tendencies in facebook text-corpus and efficiently differentiates image-corpus into respective clusters through the Euclidian distance metrics. The most infodemic post returned a -0.9719 compound score while the most positive post returns 0.9488. Veracity assessment of polarized opinions expressed in negative clusters reveals that provocative, derogatory, obnoxious, etc. indicate propensity for infodemic tendencies. Keywords: Fake news. Facebook. Social media. Sentiment Analysis. Infodemic