Improving Arabic Fake News Detection Using Optimized Feature Selection

It is of no doubt that the advent of social media has brought several important benefits. However, there have been also attempts of abusing social media in several ways, one of which is by distributing fake news. Fake news is able to change public opinion, and it is necessary to detect such attempts. Despite its importance, there is a lack of research work that has been done in this topic on Arabic posts. The few works that studied this topic in Arabic language did not give much attention to optimizing the feature selection process, which can play an important role in further improving the detection accuracy. This work further improves fake news detection performance by optimizing the feature selection phase. Experimental work has shown that such optimizing improved the detection accuracy for traditional machine learning methods.