Toxic Fake News Detection and Classification for Combating COVID-19 Misinformation

The emergence of COVID-19 has led to a surge in fake news on social media, with toxic fake news having adverse effects on individuals, society, and governments. Detecting toxic fake news is crucial, but little prior research has been done in this area. This study aims to address this gap and identify toxic fake news to save time spent on examining nontoxic fake news. To achieve this, multiple datasets were collected from different online social networking platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. The latest samples were obtained by collecting data based on the topmost keywords extracted from the existing datasets. The instances were then labeled as toxic/nontoxic using toxicity analysis, and traditional machine-learning (ML) techniques such as linear support vector machine (SVM), conventional random forest (RF), and transformer-based ML techniques such as bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) were employed to design a toxic-fake news detection (FND) and classification system. As per the experiments, the linear SVM method outperformed BERT SVM, RF, and BERT RF with an accuracy of 92% and -score, -score, and -score of 95%, 85%, and 87%, respectively. Upon comparison, the proposed approach has either suppressed or achieved results very close to the state-of-the-art techniques in the literature by recording the best values on performance metrics such as accuracy, F1-score, precision, and recall for linear SVM. Overall, the proposed methods have shown promising results and urge further research to restrain toxic fake news. In contrast to prior research, the presented methodology leverages toxicity-oriented attributes and BERT-based sequence representations to discern toxic counterfeit news articles from nontoxic ones across social media platforms.