BDANN: BERT-Based Domain Adaptation Neural Network for Multi-Modal Fake News Detection

Nowadays, with the rapid growth of microblogging networks for news propagation, there are increasingly more people accessing news through such emerging social media. In the meantime, fake news now spreads at a faster pace and affects a larger population than ever before. Compared with traditional text news, the news posted on microblog often has attached images in the context. So how to correctly and autonomously detect fakes news in a multi-modal manner becomes a prominent challenge to be addressed. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end model, named BERT-based domain adaptation neural network for multi-modal fake news detection (BDANN). BDANN comprises three main modules: a multi-modal feature extractor, a domain classifier and a fake news detector. Specifically, the multi-modal feature extractor employs the pretrained BERT model to extract text features and the pretrained VGG-19 model to extract image features. The extracted features are then concatenated and fed to the detector to distinguish fake news. The role of the domain classifier is mainly to map the multi-modal features of different events to the same feature space. To assess the performance of BDANN, we conduct extensive experiments on two multimedia datasets: Twitter and Weibo. The experimental results show that BDANN outperforms the state-of-the-art models. Moreover, we further discuss the existence of noisy images in the Weibo dataset that may affect the results.