Multimodal Social Media Fake News Detection Based on Similarity Inference and Adversarial Networks

As social networks become increasingly complex, contemporary fake news often includes textual descriptionsof events accompanied by corresponding images or videos. Fake news in multiple modalities is more likely tocreate a misleading perception among users. While early research primarily focused on text-based features forfake news detection mechanisms, there has been relatively limited exploration of learning shared representationsin multimodal (text and visual) contexts. To address these limitations, this paper introduces a multimodal modelfor detecting fake news, which relies on similarity reasoning and adversarial networks. The model employsBidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformers (BERT) and Text Convolutional Neural Network (Text-CNN) for extracting textual features while utilizing the pre-trained Visual Geometry Group 19-layer (VGG-19) toextract visual features. Subsequently, the model establishes similarity representations between the textual featuresextracted by Text-CNN and visual features through similarity learning and reasoning. Finally, these features arefused to enhance the accuracy of fake news detection, and adversarial networks have been employed to investigatethe relationship between fake news and events. This paper validates the proposed model using publicly availablemultimodal datasets from Weibo and Twitter. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed approachachieves superior performance on Twitter, with an accuracy of 86%, surpassing traditional unimodalmodalmodelsand existing multimodal models. In contrast, the overall better performance of our model on the Weibo datasetsurpasses the benchmark models across multiple metrics. The application of similarity reasoning and adversarialnetworks in multimodal fake news detection significantly enhances detection effectiveness in this paper. However,current research is limited to the fusion of only text and image modalities. Future research directions should aimto further integrate features fromadditionalmodalities to comprehensively represent themultifaceted informationof fake news.