A benchmark study of machine learning models for online fake news detection

The proliferation of fake news and its propagation on social media has become a major concern due to its ability to create devastating impacts. Different machine learning approaches have been suggested to detect fake news. However, most of those focused on a specific type of news (such as political) which leads us to the question of dataset-bias of the models used. In this research, we conducted a benchmark study to assess the performance of different applicable machine learning approaches on three different datasets where we accumulated the largest and most diversified one. We explored a number of advanced pre-trained language models for fake news detection along with the traditional and deep learning ones and compared their performances from different aspects…