ARCNN framework for multimodal infodemic detection

Fake news and misinformation have adopted various propagation media over time, nowadays spreading predominantly through online social networks. During the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, false information is affecting human life in many spheres The world needs automated detection technology and efforts are being made to meet this requirement with the use of artificial intelligence. Neural network detection mechanisms are robust and durable and hence are used extensively in fake news detection. Deep learning algorithms demonstrate efficiency when they are provided with a large amount of training data. Given the scarcity of relevant fake news datasets, we built the Coronavirus Infodemic Dataset (CovID), which contains fake news posts and articles related to coronavirus. This paper presents a novel framework, the Allied Recurrent and Convolutional Neural Network (ARCNN), to detect fake news based on two different modalities: text and image. Our approach uses recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and combines both streams to generate a final prediction. We present extensive research on various popular RNN and CNN models and their performance on six coronavirus-specific fake news datasets. To exhaustively analyze performance, we present experimentation performed and results obtained by combining both modalities using early fusion and four types of late fusion techniques. The proposed framework is validated by comparisons with state-of-the-art fake news detection mechanisms, and our models outperform each of them.