A Multi-Model Learning Framework for Fake News Detection on Social Media

Abstract

The rapid proliferation of user-generated content on social media platforms has transformed the way information is created, shared, and consumed. While this democratization of information has clear benefits, it has also enabled the large-scale dissemination of fake news, which poses serious threats to public health, political stability, financial markets, and social cohesion. Automatic fake news detection has therefore become an active and urgent research problem in computer science. This paper proposes a multi-model learning framework that combines the complementary strengths of classical machine learning classifiers, deep sequential neural networks, and transformer-based contextual language models to detect fake news on social media. The framework integrates lexical, semantic, and contextual features through a weighted soft-voting ensemble that fuses predictions from a Support Vector Machine, a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory network, and a fine-tuned BERT encoder. Experiments were conducted on three widely used public benchmark datasets, namely LIAR, FakeNewsNet, and ISOT, comprising more than one hundred thousand labeled news statements and articles. The proposed ensemble achieved an accuracy of 96.4% and an F1-score of 96.1% on the ISOT dataset, outperforming each individual constituent model and several competitive baselines reported in the literature. Ablation studies confirm that the transformer component contributes the largest performance gain, while the ensemble fusion improves robustness and reduces variance across datasets. The results demonstrate that combining heterogeneous learning paradigms yields a more accurate and generalizable fake news detector than any single model in isolation. The paper also discusses computational cost, interpretability, and limitations, and outlines directions for multimodal and cross-lingual extensions.