Guardians of Truth: Exploring Techniques for Veracity Identification in social media during an Infodemic

With the recent advent of technology, social networks are accessible 24/7 using mobile devices. During covid-19 pandemic the propagation of misinformation are mostly related to the disease, its cures and prevention. With Twitter as the medium this information was spreaded to millions of people who lack domain specific knowledge. This can lead to bloster fear and direct damage to the people. This research focuses on identifying the veracity of the Twitter posts behind pandemic situation. The authors have proposed a Transformer Model using Bat Algorithm for identifying the fake news. This model is trained and evaluated using infodemic metadata. Our experimental results shows by which proposed model accurately detected the fake news and achieved 96.5% of f1-score.