A Review of Techniques to Combat The Peril of Fake News

Now is “The Information Age” i.e. the data age. It is in this period of human history that many aspects have undergone a paradigm shift including means of consumption of news. Recently witnessed is an inevitable dependency on Social Media for gaining information or news on a daily basis. This dependency further accounts vulnerability as there are manipulators who are intentionally willing to exploit this scenario to spread Fake News. Also, adding fuel to the fire is that the advent of Big Data disposal in form of articles, headlines, videos, tweets, posts and hashtags, has increased this vulnerability manifolds. Due to diversified sources of information and the increase in use of social media to consume news, the legitimacy of the data has become a serious concern today. It is a matter of critical apprehension that what is being asserted as fact or being accepted as authentic information should be tested on anvil of veracity. This problem has potential to cause political as well as social harm. This paper focuses on comprehensive study of all such approaches and analyzing the approaches adapted to combat the issue of Fake News for laying a better foreground of the issue and finding out further research scope in this area. A comparative analysis of publicly available datasets for research in this area is also presented.