Methods of Identifying Fake News: A Systematic Review Study

Fake news is spreading day by day due to individuals’ accessibility to social networks and those platforms with a lack of direct monitoring capability. Thus, understanding how to distinguish fake news can be a significant step in reducing such influences.

In this systematic review, original articles were obtained from those research conducted on the subject of identifying fake news in the world in the period 2015 to 2020, which was published in prestigious domestic and international scientific journals and collected in local and international databases. Finally, after considering the inclusion and exclusion criteria, 43 articles were reviewed.

By careful review of included studies, those articles were classified into two general categories: 1. Human identification method. 2. Automatic or machine identification method. The indicators presented on the subject and the progress made in this area also indicate many weaknesses in recognizing fake news. On the one hand, machine models that use databases, it is not possible to provide a model that works properly in the real world, and on the other hand, using human methods is very time-consuming.

It seems that there is still a weakness in diagnosis, and in many cases, the real world has not been treated well; however, in recent years, the social network Twitter has performed much better than other systems.