ConvNet frameworks for multi-modal fake news detection

An upsurge of false information revolves around the internet. Social media and websites are flooded with unverified news posts. These posts are comprised of text, images, audio, and videos. There is a requirement for a system that detects fake content in multiple data modalities. We have seen a considerable amount of research on classification techniques for textual fake news detection, while frameworks dedicated to visual fake news detection are very few. We explored the state-of-the-art methods using deep networks such as CNNs and RNNs for multi-modal online information credibility analysis. They show rapid improvement in classification tasks without requiring pre-processing. To aid the ongoing research over fake news detection using CNN models, we build textual and visual modules to analyze their performances over multi-modal datasets. We exploit latent features present inside text and images using layers of convolutions. We see how well these convolutional neural networks perform classification when provided with only latent features and analyze what type of images are needed to be fed to perform efficient fake news detection. We propose a multi-modal Coupled ConvNet architecture that fuses both the data modules and efficiently classifies online news depending on its textual and visual content. We thence offer a comparative analysis of the results of all the models utilized over three datasets. The proposed architecture outperforms various state-of-the-art methods for fake news detection with considerably high accuracies.