Exploiting Multi-domain Visual Information for Fake News Detection

The increasing popularity of social media promotes the proliferation of fake news. With the development of multimedia technology, fake news attempts to utilize multimedia content with images or videos to attract and mislead readers for rapid dissemination, which makes visual content an important part of fake news. Fake-news images, images attached to fake news posts, include not only fake images that are maliciously tampered but also real images that are wrongly used to represent irrelevant events. Hence, how to fully exploit the inherent characteristics of fake-news images is an important but challenging problem for fake news detection. In the real world, fake-news images may have significantly different characteristics from real-news images at both physical and semantic levels, which can be clearly reflected in the frequency and pixel domain, respectively. Therefore, we propose a novel framework Multi-domain Visual Neural Network (MVNN) to fuse the visual information of frequency and pixel domains for detecting fake news. Specifically, we design a CNN-based network to automatically capture the complex patterns of fake-news images in the frequency domain; and utilize a multi-branch CNN-RNN model to extract visual features from different semantic levels in the pixel domain. An attention mechanism is utilized to fuse the feature representations of frequency and pixel domains dynamically. Extensive experiments conducted on a real world dataset demonstrate that MVNN outperforms existing methods with at least 9.2% in accuracy, and can help improve the performance of multi-modal fake news detection by over 5.2%.