FNNet: a secure ensemble-based approach for fake news detection using blockchain.

Blockchain technology has unlocked the doors of building decentralized applications, where security plays a vital role. Any transaction ever created in a blockchain is recorded permanently. With the increasing usage of social media modalities today, many non-reputable sources create and publish fake and luring news. Due to the easy availability of the internet and excessive use of social media, fake news can spread like a flash. It causes the need to eliminate fake news posted on social media platforms. The main motive of the paper is to develop an ensemble model that assists in the automated identification of fake news. This paper addresses the identified gaps in detecting multi-modal fake news. We propose Fake News Network (FNNet) as a novel secure blockchain-based deep learning model to detect fake news. It uses blockchain and deep learning to assure data integrity and learn data representations, respectively. The proposed model consists of four layers: the node layer, the deep learning layer, the blockchain layer, and the network layer. This is an ensemble deep-learning model that leverages Bi-LSTM and CNN models, where the Bi-LSTM model captures the sequential data in both directions, and CNN captures the hidden features. We use Pheme, CrisisLexT6, and ISOT datasets to train the model. FNNet achieves an average accuracy of 86.93%, 92.22%, and 98.53% on Pheme, CrisisLexT9, and ISOT datasets, respectively. Our results show that the proposed model is robust and applicable to real-time datasets and social media networks to detect fake news effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]