Developing A Web Browser Extension to Prevent the Spread of Fake News

Abstract

Fake news causes huge social problems such as misdirecting and provoking the masses, creating an atmosphere of chaos by spreading fear. Detecting and stopping the dissemination of fake news has been an important and priority issue due to its rapid spread, difficulty to detect, and negative effects. In our study, a new Chrome extension that detects fake news has been developed in order to detect and prevent the spread of fake news. In the study; natural language processing, data mining methods, and various machine learning techniques for instance Passive Aggressive, Random Forest, Support Vector Machine, AdaBoost, XGBoost, and Long-Short-Term Memory (LSTM) algorithms are used. The accuracy rates of the algorithms, confusion matrices, AUC rates, and ROC curves were compared. The created machine learning model has been implemented in the online internet environment by using Flask and Rest API in the Python program. Finally, the Chrome extension interface was built using Javascript, HTML, and CSS. The LSTM algorithm gave the highest prediction result with a rate of 90.72% compared to other algorithms.