Machine learning for detection of fake news

Recent political events have lead to an increase in the popularity and spread of fake news. As demonstrated by the widespread effects of the large onset of fake news, humans are inconsistent if not outright poor detectors of fake news. With this, efforts have been made to automate the process of fake news detection. The most popular of such attempts include "blacklists" of sources and authors that are unreliable. While these tools are useful, in order to create a more complete end to end solution, we need to account for more difficult cases where reliable sources and authors release fake news. As such, the goal of this project was to create a tool for detecting the language patterns that characterize fake and real news through the use of machine learning and natural language processing techniques. The results of this project demonstrate the ability for machine learning to be useful in this task. We have built a model that catches many intuitive indications of real and fake news as well as an application that aids in the visualization of the classification decision.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2018

Author dc:creator

• O'Brien, Nicole (Nicole J.)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Tomaso Poggio.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/119727

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/119727