• International Journal of Knowledge Content Development & Technology
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.35-51
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• 2021

This study measured the effects of fake news and propaganda on managing information on COVID-19 among the Nigerian citizenry. This study examined sources of information on COVID-19 available to the people, evaluated reasons behind spreading fake news, examined how fake news has affected the spread of COVID-19 pandemic in Nigeria, established the consequences of fake news on managing COVID-19 pandemic and as well identified ways to contain fake news at a time like this in Nigeria.It is a survey with a sample size of 375 participants selected using simple random technique. Instrument of data gathering was questionnaire widely distributed in the six geo-political zones of Nigeria using Survey monkey. Data was analysed using frequencies, counts and percentages, tables and charts. Findings revealed that people rely more on radio, television, and social media for information on COVID-19. Fake news is spread by people mostly for political reasons and intention to cause panic. In Nigeria, fake news has led to disbelief of the existence of the virus thereby leading to violation of precautionary measures among the citizenry and lack of trust in the government. Concerted effort on the part of the government is required to give public enlightenment on the danger of fake news. Also, directorate of anti-fake news should be established to censor and reprimand sources of fake news. People should always check source of information to confirm its credibility and be weary of sharing unconfirmed information especially on the social media.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.197-216
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• 2022

With the development of Internet and mobile technology and the spread of social media, a large amount of information is being generated and distributed online. Some of them are useful information for the public, but others are misleading information. The misleading information, so-called 'fake news', has been causing great harm to our society in recent years. Since the global spread of COVID-19 in 2020, much of fake news has been distributed online. Unlike other fake news, fake news related to COVID-19 can threaten people's health and even their lives. Therefore, intelligent technology that automatically detects and prevents fake news related to COVID-19 is a meaningful research topic to improve social health. Fake news related to COVID-19 has spread rapidly through social media, however, there have been few studies in Korea that proposed intelligent fake news detection using the information about how the fake news spreads through social media. Under this background, we propose a novel model that uses Graph2vec, one of the graph embedding methods, to effectively detect fake news related to COVID-19. The mainstream approaches of fake news detection have focused on news content, i.e., characteristics of the text, but the proposed model in this study can exploit information transmission relationships in social engagement networks when detecting fake news related to COVID-19. Experiments using a real-world data set have shown that our proposed model outperforms traditional models from the perspectives of prediction accuracy.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.29 no.2
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• pp.267-283
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• 2023

The COVID-19 pandemic, which began in December 2019 and continues to this day, has left the public needing information to help them cope with the pandemic. However, COVID-19-related fake news on social media seriously threatens the public's health. In particular, if fake news related to COVID-19 is massively spread with similar content, the time required for verification to determine whether it is genuine or fake will be prolonged, posing a severe threat to our society. In response, academics have been actively researching intelligent models that can quickly detect COVID-19-related fake news. Still, the data used in most of the existing studies are in English, and studies on Korean fake news detection are scarce. In this study, we collect data on COVID-19-related fake news written in Korean that is spread on social media and propose an intelligent fake news detection model using it. The proposed model utilizes the frequency information of parts of speech, one of the linguistic characteristics, to improve the prediction performance of the fake news detection model based on Doc2Vec, a document embedding technique mainly used in prior studies. The empirical analysis shows that the proposed model can more accurately identify Korean COVID-19-related fake news by increasing the recall and F1 score compared to the comparison model.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.32 no.4
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• pp.945-963
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• 2022

With the widespread use of social media, online social platforms like Twitter have become a place of rapid dissemination of information-both accurate and inaccurate. After the COVID-19 outbreak, the overabundance of fake information and rumours on online social platforms about the COVID-19 pandemic has spread over society as quickly as the virus itself. As a result, fake news poses a significant threat to effective virus response by negatively affecting people's willingness to follow the proper public health guidelines and protocols, which makes it important to identify fake information from online platforms for the public interest. In this research, we introduce an approach to detect fake news using deep learning techniques, which outperform traditional machine learning techniques with a 93.1% accuracy. We then investigate the content differences between real and fake news by applying topic modeling and linguistic analysis. Our results show that topics on Politics and Government services are most common in fake news. In addition, we found that fake news has lower analytic and authenticity scores than real news. With the findings, we discuss important academic and practical implications of the study.

• International Journal of Knowledge Content Development & Technology
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.65-82
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• 2020

This study examined information sharing and evaluation as determinants of the spread of fake news among Nigerian youths on social media using experience from COVID-19 pandemic. A descriptive survey design was adopted for the study and a Web-based questionnaire (Google Forms) was used to collect data for the study. The total responses of 278 were collected from the participants, which represents the unit of analysis. The finding of the study revealed that most Nigerian youths used Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and Instagram to share information on COVID-19. However, only a few Nigerians used Linkedln and other types of social media to share information on COVID-19. It was also found that building a relationship with social media communities, enjoyment and risk taking, and political inclination influence the sharing behavior of Nigerian youths during the COVID-19 pandemic. Results show that social media handle/page found sharing of fake news on COVID-19 especially on the treatment, vaccines numbers of cases and symptoms. The study concludes that there is a positive relationship between information evaluation and the spreading of fake news on COVID-19 among Nigerians. Information sharing and evaluation should be done with the utmost level of objectivity and sincerity.

• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.149-156
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• 2022

In the current COVID-19 pandemic, fake news and misinformation related to COVID-19 have been causing serious confusion in our society. To accurately detect such fake news, social context-based methods have been widely studied in the literature. They detect fake news based on the social context that indicates how a news article is propagated over social media (e.g., Twitter). Most existing COVID-19 related datasets gathered for fake news detection, however, contain only the news content information, but not its social context information. In this case, the social context-based detection methods cannot be applied, which could be a big obstacle in the fake news detection research. To address this issue, in this work, we collect from Twitter the social context information based on CoAID, which is a COVID-19 news content dataset built for fake news detection, thereby building CoAID⁺ that includes both the news content information and its social context information. The CoAID⁺ dataset can be utilized in a variety of methods for social context-based fake news detection, thus would help revitalize the fake news detection research area. Finally, through a comprehensive analysis of the CoAID⁺ dataset in various perspectives, we present some interesting features capable of differentiating real and fake news.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Computer Information Conference
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• 2022.01a
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• pp.411-412
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• 2022

본 논문에서는 코로나19 뉴스와 코로나19 가짜뉴스의 데이터셋을 활용하여 입력 받은 뉴스가 가짜뉴스일 확률을 예측한다. 가짜 뉴스 본문에는 코로나19, 대통령, 정부, 가짜, 언론 등의 키워드의 빈도가 높았다. 위의 키워드를 토대로 나이브 베이즈 모델링을 하여 이를 적용해 가짜 뉴스를 가려내는 웹페이지를 개발하였다.

• Journal of Korea Entertainment Industry Association
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• v.15 no.6
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• pp.179-191
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• 2021

Social anxiety continues due to the emergence and spread of covid-19 infections. In this situation, false information related to the covid-19 infection is distributed through SNS in the form of fake news, which is a stumbling block to overcoming the national crisis. This study tried to present a theoretical basis for the establishment of policies for the regulation and eradication of fake news circulated through SNS by examining the effect of social anxiety on the fake news acceptance attitude by focusing on the use degree of SNS. For this study, a survey of 380 university students in the Seoul metropolitan area was conducted, and 336 data collected among them were analyzed as SPSS 25.0 and AMOS 23.0. According to the analysis results, social anxiety has a positive effect on the fake news acceptance attitude and the use degree of SNS, also the use degree of SNS has a positive effect on the fake news acceptance attitude. In addition, social anxiety has been confirmed to have a positive effect on fake news acceptance attitude through the use degree of SNS. These results empirically confirm the relationship between social anxiety, fake news acceptance attitude, and the use degree of SNS.

• International Journal of Computer Science & Network Security
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• v.24 no.7
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• pp.195-201
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• 2024

With the Covid-19(Corona Virus) spread all around the world, people are using this propaganda and the desperate need of the citizens to know the news about this mysterious virus by spreading fake news. Some Countries arrested people who spread fake news about this, and others made them pay a fine. And since Social Media has become a significant source of news, .there is a profound need to detect these fake news. The main aim of this research is to develop a web-based model using a combination of machine learning algorithms to detect fake news. The proposed model includes an advanced framework to identify tweets with fake news using Context Analysis; We assumed that Natural Language Processing(NLP) wouldn't be enough alone to make context analysis as Tweets are usually short and do not follow even the most straightforward syntactic rules, so we used Tweets Features as several retweets, several likes and tweet-length we also added statistical credibility analysis for Twitter users. The proposed algorithms are tested on four different benchmark datasets. And Finally, to get the best accuracy, we combined two of the best algorithms used SVM ( which is widely accepted as baseline classifier, especially with binary classification problems ) and Naive Base.

• Proceedings of the Korea Information Processing Society Conference
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• 2021.05a
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• pp.312-313
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• 2021

가짜뉴스가 사회연결망 상에서 빠르게 전파되면서 사회적 혼란을 야기하고 있어 가짜뉴스를 탐지하는 것이 중요한 문제로 대두되고 있다. 최근 가짜뉴스 탐지 연구에서 사회연결망의 전파 정보를 활용한 방법이 기존 뉴스 컨텐츠 기반 가짜뉴스 탐지 방법보다 효과적임을 보였다. 따라서 본 논문에서는 기존 CoAID 데이터셋을 기반으로 사회연결망상의 전파 데이터를 포함하는 COVID-19 Cascade 데이터셋을 소개한다. COVID-19 Cascade 를 활용하면 전파 기반 가짜뉴스 탐지 방법에도 적용이 가능하다. 이후 간단한 분석을 통해 진짜뉴스와 가짜뉴스의 차이를 확인한다.