DANES: Deep Neural Network Ensemble Architecture for Social and Textual Context-aware Fake News Detection

The growing popularity of social media platforms has simplified the creation and distribution of news articles but also creates a conduit for spreading fake news. In consequence, the need arises for effective context-aware fake news detection mechanisms, where the contextual information can be built either from the textual content of posts or from available social data (e.g., information about the users, reactions to posts, or the social network). In this paper, we propose DANES, a Deep Neural Network Ensemble Architecture for Social and Textual Context-aware Fake News Detection. DANES comprises a Text Branch for a textual content-based context and a Social Branch for the social context. These two branches are used to create a novel Network Embedding. Preliminary ablation results on 3 real-world datasets, i.e., BuzzFace, Twitter15, and Twitter16, are promising, with an accuracy that outperforms state-of-the-art solutions when employing both social and textual content features. In the present setting, with so much manipulation on social media platforms, our solution can enhance fake news identification even with limited training data.