Fourth International Conference on Communication & Media Studies

Abstract

While the Digital Age and the internet has made it easier for information to be shared across the world, it has also brought an ugly side: the menace called fake news. With the freedom to hide behind a screen, troublemakers have gained a tool to originate and spread malicious disinformation, which has resulted in dangerous consequences: loss of reputation, health, and possibly, life. If not contained, this could also lead to mass unrest and anarchy. Fake News proliferation therefore threatens the very foundations on which democracy is built. With social media feeds, blogs, and online sources becoming the mainstay for news consumption; proliferation and propagation of news have become almost uncontainable. Fake News gets generated and propagated so rapidly before authentication can even keep pace with it. Manual intervention – validity of each news item checked by experts are not able to scale in step with the speed of propagation. These methods are also time consuming, error prone, and heavily dependent on domain expertise of individuals. The advent of Artificial intelligence has brought a tool, which could make this process more accurate, speedy and efficient. Our discussion is centred on the application of Artificial Intelligence techniques to help control the phenomenon of fake news, which has been extensively researched by International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, India. Our solutions can help bust fake news in various domains, such as politics and healthcare, without language barriers. We also offer suggestions for flagging news like clickbait and hate news.