Long-Short-Term Memory Model for Fake News Detection in Nigeria

Background: The advent of technology allows information to be passed through the Internet at a breakneck speed and enables the involvement of many individuals in the use of different social media platforms. Propagation of fake news through the Internet has become rampant due to digitalisation, and the spread of fake news can cause irreparable damage to the victims. The conventional approach to fake news detection is time-consuming, hence introducing fake news detection systems. Existing fake news detection systems have yielded low accuracy and are unsuitable in Nigeria. Objective: This research aims to design and implement a framework for fake news detection using the Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) model. Methodology: The dataset for the model was obtained from Nigerian dailies and Kaggle and pre-processed by removing punctuation marks and stop words, stemming, tokenisation and one hot representation. Feature extraction was done on the datasets to remove outliers. The locally acquired dataset from Nigeria was balanced using Synthetic Minority Oversampling Techniques (SMOTE) Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM), a variant of Recurrent Neural Network (RNN)-which solved the problem of losing gained knowledge and information over a long period faced by RNN- was used as the detection model This model was implemented using Python 3.9. The model detected fake news by classifying real and fake news approaches. The dataset was fed into the model, and the model classified them as either fake or real news by processing the dataset through input and hidden layers of varying numbers of neurons. accuracy F1 score and detection time were used as the evaluation metrics. The results were then compared to some selected machine learning models and a hybrid of convolutional neural networks and long short-term memory models (CNN-LSTM). Results: The result shows that the LSTM model on a balanced dataset performed best as the two news classes were accurately classified, giving an average detection accuracy of 92.86%, which took the model 0.42 seconds to detect whether news was real or fake. Also, 87.50% average detection accuracy was obtained from an imbalanced dataset. Compared to other machine learning models, SVM and CNN-LSTM gave 81.25% accuracy for imbalanced datasets and 82.14% and 78.57% for balanced datasets, respectively. Conclusion: The outcome of this research shows that the deep learning approach outperformed some machine learning models for fake news detection in terms of performance accuracy. Unique contribution: This work has contributed knowledge by employing an LSTM model for detecting Nigerian fake news using an indigenous dataset. Key Recommendation: Future research should increase the data size of indigenous datasets for fake news detection to achieve improved accuracy. Keywords: Fake news, SMOTE, accuracy, detection, model, deep learning